h.r. giger: beyond the alien

By Carolina Arán

It’s said of Giger that he acted as a channel of communication with the other world, that his art came directly from some invisible and magical place that he made visible automatically. His quest for beauty through horror is fully known from 1979, for his oscarized work of scenic design in the cult film «Alien: the eighth passenger». However, part of his prolific and diverse production remains hidden in the eyes of the general public, five years after his death.

Hans Ruedi Giger was born in rural Switzerland in 1940 as a flower of steel and thorns in the middle of an idyllic meadow, his vision ahead of time will make him one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th Century, both in mainstream and underground. Trained as an industrial designer and interior architect, he soon began to explore art under the influence of surrealism, German Outsider Art, psychoanalysis and interpretation of dreams by Freud. He becomes known with the heyday of the poster in the 60’s, hand in hand with popular culture, marketing sinister illustrations that have little to do with the acid and hippy psychodelia of the moment. As a plastic and graphic artist he experiments with all kinds of techniques, although he preferred those that brought him the maximum immediacy. Giger has no patience for oil, however in the few years he devotes to exploring this technique in an autodidactic way, in the late 1960s, he produces a series of disturbing works of great beauty and effectiveness, not as well known as their subsequent works. They are paintings of organic and surrealist landscapes that remind us of those of Max Ernst, of an attractive oneiric and captivating, where the horizon shudders between organs and cavities that twist and stretch. In his first ink drawings he also immerses himself in sinuous and angular biologies that already predict the arrival of his famous Biomechanics. This vision is consolidated by the production of his screen book «Biomechanoids», in which Giger universe is based on its definitive pillars: dreams, sexuality without fear of the explicit, birth and death. The occult symbolism, the dream universe and the theme of Eros and Thanatos will accompany the artist throughout his career. Since the early 1970s Giger begins in the technique that will make him better known as painter and illustrator, the aerographic gun. Experiment with it in an autodidactic and automatic way, working by freehand with watery ink on paper, without previous sketches. This working formula allows a direct flow from his imagination to the art media, laying the foundations of his usual creative process. A process that makes him a fascinating author who produces unique works, pieces that start from scratch as if by magic. This extreme creative sensitivity leads him to perform works that require a certain degree of trance, of introspection beyond time and space, with the airbrush as a unique and instantaneous vehicle. His impossible structures and throbbing biomechanical amassiums are labyrinthic and unfathomable, with a profusion of details that suffocate, requiring a work of total immersion in the piece. Most of his works with airbrush are reproduced in his books «Necronomicon I and II», «N.Y.C.», «Biomechanics» and «HR Giger ARh+». In addition to his books, Giger’s creations are savagely reproduced and marketed, with his consent and even without it: his elements and designs proliferate in tattoos, car and motorcycles bodies and accessories, beyond the author’s will. The beginning of the digital age favours this «Gigermania» and the increase of plagiarism and theft of his work, while providing him with an ever wider group of faithful followers, including stars of music and cinema. In the 1990s the airbrush boom reaches the United States but Giger has been developing this technique for twenty years and has lost his passion for it. He prefers to devote himself to the detailed sketches for his designs, and to collect his own work to satisfy the increasing demands of airbrush jobs without having to resort to loans. This growing success of his production also entails censorship; the destiny of Giger’s work is to be hated or loved. Its vision beyond sex and horror is shocking and controversial, not viewed favorably by traditional circles and certain feminist sectors, and is often vetted, withdrawn or confiscated.

Restless and unable to limit himself to a single discipline, Giger produces works for illustration (books, album covers, posters, tarot cards), sculpture, design and execution of all types of objects and mechanisms, interior design and furniture, fashion and makeup, video-games, short films… A tireless explorer who also leaves in his legacy his own spaces conceived as artworks, inspired by his biomechanical aesthetics: the two Giger Bar and the HR Giger Museum, which can be visited in his native Switzerland. This adventurer of the atavistic terrors also develops all kinds of projects, in which he overturns his more twisted and extravagant ideas, loaded with black humor, sinister perversity and hilarious sadism. His monumental proposal for the construction of the Swiss Transit tunnel, based on a circuit of rails shaped like a five pointed star, or his sculpture works and objects based on a famous Swiss watch Brand, are both unclassifiable. However, it is his facet as an artistic creator for cinema that elevates him as a world renowned artist, particularly his participation in the Ridley Scott saga. His visionary work on the sets, the makeup, the special effects and the design of the creatures of «Alien» (based on his necro-gnomes) rediscovers Giger’s name to the wider audience of the moment. His work gives life to the aesthetic universe of film and with it breaks the moulds of science-fiction through the barrier of horror, his designs are vital coprotagonists of each scene. The parasitic alien living on the ship has arrived to remain in the collective unconscious, and Giger has closed the circle of biomechanics.

At the end of the 20th century his work finally is consolidated in the circuits of galleries and museums, beyond the underground public and private collecting. In the last years of his life the creator of Alien focuses on personal projects like the ghost train that runs through his garden and home. He surrounds himself with his family, friends and assistants and collects art, weapons and skulls. Interestingly, the artist who has broken the veil between the two worlds doesn’t believe in life after death. The inscrutable mystery of his work doesn’t belong to mortality, but is an inherent quality of life itself. Giger shows us the darkness as an eternal source of inspiration and learning, through a path that horrifies us because it is recognized by our genetics. His universe explores the impenetrable mystery that the human is to himself, only by identifying the darkness will we be able to distinguish our own light. And it’s that, despite the macabre of his art, H.R. believes in life above all things: he does not wear in black, as is thought, by paying tribute to death; he does it because he’s a flirty man and he knows that in dark clothes you can’t see ink stains. As an old man, Giger asks his doctors not to reveal him if he has a serious illness, what remains of his life he wants to live it without fear. As if a petition had been dealt with, the artist dies in 2014 because of a fall in his house, not because of any illness. One may wonder if a chorus of celestial xenomorphs has received him in some corner of the ship that flies between the present and eternity.