Elzo Durt: Shouting Polychromy

April 18, 2017

Like everything from Belgium, Elzo Durt often turns up without warning. He appears with an unlikely idea tucked under his arm, unruffled, a huge grin slapped on his face. He seems to have something permanently up his sleeve, something ready to cause massive chaos, always at the edge of an indecipherable savagery. A linchpin of nightlife in Brussels and one-half of Teenage Menopause Records, Durt is primarily an illustrator, known for his shrieking, multi-hued screen printing and his long-time collaboration with Parisian label Born Bad, for whom he has created numerous record sleeves and posters over almost ten years.

From his first flyers to his current work, Durt’s work has become more powerful and his compositions are now more streamlined, yet the foundation of his technique has remained the same – collages of elements laid out in an occult order, assembled with obsessive precision and recounting, in a series of blinding flashes, the history of a world governed by an endless folklore of mutant divinities. Elzo Durt is Gee Vaucher without the heavy-handed symbolism, Virgil Finlay trapped under a wall of blinding neon lights, Gustave Doré dancing on a bed of razorblades, Terry Gilliam lying on Franquin’s drawing board with his throat slit – in a nutshell, sheer terror, running free at breakneck speed, parties that will never end – what an explosive mess!

Born Bad are now publishing Elzo Durt - Complete Works 2003-2016, a monograph bringing together all his previous works. Several weeks before the opening of an exhibition devoted to his work in Paris, at Agnès B.’s Galerie du jour, we asked Durt to tell us more about ten of his most impressive illustrations.

This is a poster created for a Franco-Belgian exhibition mostly featuring children’s illustrators. They asked me to create a Belgian flag, which would be hung at the entrance – another illustrator was in charge of the French one. Naturally, a Belgian flag with Marc Dutroux [notorious head of a local pedophile ring], was out of the question. Shame, because I liked that idea. And then there were the Smurfs, our other great national symbol. Like most Belgians, I was highly affected by this comic, which I read prolifically throughout my childhood; not so much today. Nowadays I buy comics strips to create sources for my work, not to read them. Elzo Durt

Header image © Elzo Durt

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