Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland. 2020
The Shadow of circles
Michel Gauthier
“The picture depicts the corner of a French-styled garden […]: a regular garden without plants (only […] bushes cut into perfect geometric forms) […]. The entire landscape is deserted: without a living character […] Remember. It was in the gardens,” not those in Frederiksbad and Last Year at Marienbad(1961)1, but those of the Perfect Garden by Sigurður Árni Sigurðsson. Following the laws of the perspectiva artificialis, this ideal garden offers a view of a white quadrilateral shape, on which spheres of the same colour, poised on vertical masts, which the eye immediately recognises as depictions of trees, evenly distributed, along with their projected shadows, around a vast central circle, a pond perhaps, which draws the negative image of a reservoir of raw canvas. Last Year at Marienbad,but also just as much Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the mind-boggling illustrated novel published by Francesco Colonna at the end of the 15th century2, and his ideal garden on Cythera Island, entirely governed by the geometry of the circle, the Pythagorean figure of perfection. Perfect Garden: two sizeable paintings (120 x 160 cm), painted by Sigurðsson in 1995, while he was living in Paris. Each adopts a particular point of view; one more aerial and perpendicular than the other, thus creating varying depths of field. No angle, however, allows one to discover what the other would have left unnoticed. This diptych is interesting because it brings together some of the main characteristics of Sigurðsson’s art: a simplified broad representation; the predominant place of the projected shadow and the leitmotif of the hole, of the void.
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The trees in the Perfect Garden are the subject of a perfectly schematic representation: a ball poised on a stem. The motor of the representative action is less mimetic than semiological. It is a question of displaying the sign of a tree rather than the image of the tree. These signs of trees seem to be placed, to borrow a phrase from Charles Sanders Peirce, mid-way between an icon and a symbol: their significance stems just as much from their resemblance to the object they refer to as the forces of convention, such as those used in signage, for example. Since a sign starts to function long before the representation work has been completed, a simple sphere on a pole suffices. If, in a large painting without title from 1994 (200 x 220 cm) and several others from 1995, Jardin P.1, Jardin P.2 and Jardin P.3, the artist seems to have made concessions to mimesis by using green for the trees and lawns and blue for the water of the ponds, the pictogramatic style of the representation indicates that this is not a garden that is being represented, but the idea of a garden, a concept of a garden, perhaps a dream. In the 1994 painting, the impeccable geometric rigour of the alignments of trees arranged around an empty and illuminated vacuum, which further strengthen a perspective that is simultaneously aerial, perpendicular and vertiginous, even embues the pictogram with a dreamlike quality. The Perfect Garden, on the other hand, dispenses with colour: white suffices. In 1989, Didier Marcel made a small sculpture without title, akin to Sigurðsson’s two paintings: Three trees planted in perforated hardboard – white balls of plaster on metallic stems. The additional perforations suggest other possible locations for the trees; at the conceptual stage, all potential changes have to remain possible. The Perfect Garden paintings share that same scaled model aesthetic with Marcel’s sculpture. They do not have to represent an existing reality, but an idea, a project. In tandem with his paintings, Sigurðsson has in fact made scale models. There is a model of the ideal garden from 1993, and there are also models relating to Garden P.1, P.2 and P.3, as well as the perfect garden: Proposal for a garden and Model 2 (both from 1995). Painting can speak the same language as models, unlike photography. The latter can only represent what exists ‒ in which case one talks about “signs of existence” ‒ whereas the function of the model is to represent what does not yet exist. Thus the perfect garden painted by Sigurðsson is the opposite of the Giverny garden which Claude Monet so meticulously arranged so that he could paint it. It does not have to exist in order to be painted.
Sigurðsson’s utopian gardens are imagined in paintings and models. Occasionally, the trees can also borrow the form of sculptures, as can be seen in the group of sculptures called The three levels (1999): which are 3.5 m high and made of reflective aluminium, with each piece distributing, at different heights, three pentagonal tiers with rounded corners, which project shadows and luminous fragments in the surrounding space. By echoing Yggdrasill, the universal tree in Nordic mythology, which connects the three great domains (celestial, intermediary and subterranean), already evoked in a slightly younger painting, and a representation that was less advanced in the schematisation process, these sculptures represent one of the culminating points in the abstraction process in Sigurðsson’s depiction of the tree. We know that the tree was one of the major transitional objects in Mondrian’s shift towards abstraction. That aptitude is confirmed here. It is not surprising therefore that the tree lends itself to a potentially abstract representation, after providing a precious model for the mathematical theory of graphs, as well as the hierarchical organization of data in computer science. The tree possesses that particularity of being both emblematic of the natural world and rational thought.
The tendency towards schematised representation starts to clearly manifest itself in Sigurðsson’s work with the introduction, at the beginning of the 2000s, of the motif of the molecule. One of the most common conventional ways of representing a molecule is to depict the atoms as spheres or disks and the links between them as lines. In 2000, the artist made two paintings, one blue and the other orange, both of which are given the eloquent title of Molecule for canvas. The two molecular structures differ from each other. They are not a far cry from the perfect garden, not only because their representative mode is not very distant from that of the molecule, but above all because the image of a plant seems to have served as the transition between the two. In 1996, Sigurðsson made an oil painting on cardboard representing a tree with a bending trunk, which distributes its leaves in space a bit like the molecules of an atom. In the same year, a painting called The Kenya tree presents, at the end of its branches, several slightly rounded disks, which also foreshadowed the figuration of atoms to come. Once the molecular motif is introduced into his work, it becomes very fertile. As early as 1999, it is used in the twin paintings called Continental Drift. From the sphere of plants to the physics of drifting or shifting tectonic plates, molecular forms possess a great representative aptitude in Sigurðsson’s work. They can even exist in three dimensions, such as the large aluminium wall reliefs from 2017 and 2018 ‒ in which dozens of atoms are assembled.
Like those garden trees, Sigurðsson’s molecules, whether they are floating or drifting, project shadows. In the world of the artist, even outlines or signs project shadows. If the difference between an object and its shadow is normally sensitive to the extent that the latter only preserves the contours of the former and forgets all of its other aspects, in the case of the images we are dealing with here, trees and molecules are already a product of that schematisation. Thus their shadows are only distinguished by slight deformations and the loss of colour. In other words, in the pictographic universe, shadows are almost just as much images as the rest.
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Those who have viewed several of Sigurðsson’s works will know that shadows play a major role in the artist’s imagination. The green garden in the three paintings of 1995 is conceived according to the shadows. Plains advance in the three rectangular basins to receive the shadows of the trees. The dimensions of each one is determined by the size of the shadow that is cast and which it must support. In the world to which this garden belongs, the sun therefore never changes position, the light source is fixed. The shadows in the Perfect Garden hold just as many surprises. Indeed, the orientation of the shadows cast by the trees plays no small role in maintaining the unreal feeling already created by the extreme schematization of the figuration. They are each positioned in the extension of the diameter of the circle and turned towards the exterior of the ring created by the trees. As soon as this observation is made, at least two competing interpretative hypotheses spring to mind: Either the light source is located slightly above the garden and is limited in size, meaning that it cannot be the sunlight at its zenith, but why then does this light source not appear in the image, which is, however, drawn from an elevated point of view? Or – alternative conjecture – the enigmatic central vacuum possesses the power to deflect rays towards its circumference, which would explain the shadow, which it seems to dive into. If a large painting from a few years earlier does not enable us to solve the enigma of the shadow of the trees in the two canvases from 1995, it nevertheless helps us to understand the relationship between the circle/hole and what happens in the air. In Sigurðsson’s imagination, the axis connecting the bottom with the above has a structural function and is a lot more active than the horizontal axis. A painting from 1990, Cloud and Lake, which has both a cartoonish and romantic style, possibly owing something to the art of Lawren Harris (his Clouds, Lake Superior from1923 comes to mind), which is less geometric and less abstract than the two views of the Perfect Garden, reveals in a mountainous landscape, a gigantic deep blue excavation: a lake. Above it, hovers a peculiar cloud that has the exact same outline, as if its shape had been formed by the contour of the lake. It is perhaps a perfectly circular cloud of this kind which has been casting its shadow since the perfect garden. We are also entitled to ask whether the spare rough canvas represents a void or a shadow? Or both?
Sigurðsson’s world does not presuppose to be without shadows. In a nameless drawing from 2018, which represents an alignment of stools, it looks as if the shadows have decided to straighten up, abandoning the laws of perspective, to lead a life that is relatively independent of the objects that created them. It brings back to mind the famous photograph taken by André Kertész in Paris in 1929: a row of garden chairs with their shadows on the ground at the centre of the image. But with Sigurðsson, even if these are graphical, conceptual or purely geometric beings, a shadow, and often with a strong presence, will follow them. Thus two untitled works from 2007 presented seven spheres against an unpainted background, yellow in one case and green in the other, but no contextual element, not even the colour of their surface enables us to identify these spheres. Positioned against a completely empty background, they seem to be only figurations of the geometric solid that is the sphere. Although they are abstract, divorced from all reality, pure pictorial beings, they are nevertheless very carefully subjected to the action of light. On one hand, the surface of each one is not uniformly lit and the play of light and shadow is not identical for the seven spheres; a late work by Sol LeWitt, A sphere lit from the top, four sides, and all their combinations (2004), also focuses on the interplay between shade and light on the surface of a sphere and around it, which further fuels the inclination to categorise Sigurðsson’s image as what we could call conceptual realism. On the other hand, all of the spheres in the 2007 painting project shadows that are bigger than the spheres, the orientation of which suggests a light source placed in the centre at a perpendicular angle to the field of vision. In other words, the shadow is the only event that places the bodies in any semblance of reality. Before LeWitt and Sigurðsson, the trading between the sphere and shadows took place on even stranger premises: in The Monumental Shadow (L’ombre monumentale) (1932) by René Magritte, an enormous celestial blue sphere, stranded on the ground, detaches itself against a cloudy background, close to a cluster of houses. As the object of our stunned and admiring gazes, like those of the philosophers in the mosaic of the 1st century BCE, discovered in Torre Annunziata close to Pompei and commented upon by Peter Sloterdijk in his famous lines3, the sphere, that symbol of formal perfection, that emblem of being and completeness, does not manage to be perfectly global in Sigurðsson’s work: projected beyond itself and swift to deform, its shadow escapes it. Should not the two paintings from 2007 be seen as contemporary versions of Melencolia ? We find the perfect sphere of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving in them at the feet of Saturn’s child, which embodies the pure geometry which the Renaissance artist became a great follower and practitioner | of. But despite all its powers, geometric euphoria and perspectivism are unable to dissipate metaphysical angst. That is why the artist is melancholic4. In Sigurðsson’s paintings, it is the dark shadow cast by the sphere that seems to be the vehicle of melancholia. Even the purest of geometric figures possesses its share of shadow, the perfection of its form is betrayed.
In viewing that shadow, which challenges the globalisation project that western thinking associates with the sphere, the globe, one should not be surprised to find examples in the history of literature of the misfortune that can befall individuals who are deprived of it. The most famous story is undoubtedly that of Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl‘s Miraculous Story,1814) by Adelbert von Chamisso: the hero gives his shadow to the devil in exchange for riches but swiftly comes to realise how its absence threatens his happiness; the devil then proposes to return the shadow to him in exchange for his soul. In a tale by Hans Christian Andersen, Skyggen (Shadows1847), a naive scientist deliberately separates himself from his shadow. The shadow, having turned into a man and made a fortune, then returns to the scientist, who has plunged into the depths of misery and who, in a dramatic reversal of roles, offers to serve as his shadow. Guillaume Apollinaire also used the theme of the separation of the shadow from the body in The Shadow’s Departure (Le Départ de l’ombre, 1911): since the disappearance of a shadow from a body signals the person’s imminent demise, a huckster steals the shadow of a young woman he no longer loves, thus provoking her disappearance. And the libretto which Hugo von Hofmannstahl composed for Richard Strauss’s opera, Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow, 1919), also draws from the curse of an absent shadow. An empress’s infertility is signalled by her inability to cast a shadow. After trying to obtain a shadow from the wife of a launderer, she renounces her ambition when she realises the misery it would inflict on the woman. Her generosity will persuade the king of spirits to grant the empress the shadow she so desperately longed for. In more recent times, the comic strip art of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, L’Ombre d’un homme (The Shadow of a man,1999), whose hero is duly called Chamisso, offers a new variation on the theme of the relationship between a person who becomes transparent and his shadow, which takes on colours. In one example of the paintings, which Sigurðsson started in 2001, it is not bodies without shadows that are depicted, but rather shadows without bodies, shadows in which the bodies that produced them are invisible.
Some of these paintings show the shadows of people. Let us ponder on one of them, a large canvas without title from 2004, which shows the shadows of two people. The opposition explored by Michael Fried in his work Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot is confronted with a borderline case here. We know that the art historian extols the modernist merits of 18th century absorption painting, one in which the character is totally absorbed by an action foreign to the beholder. Such a painting is based on the conviction that, on the one hand, a painting “had first to attract the beholderand then to arrest and finally to enthral… and, on the other hand, it was “only by negating the beholder’s presence…, only by establishing the fiction of his absence or nonexistence could his actual placement before and his enthrallment by the painting be secured.” 5. In other words, the character who is depicted must be totally absorbed by the contemplation of an object, in the way that certain children in the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin are absorbed by bubbles of soap, playing jacks or cards, in order for the beholder in turn to become totally absorbed by the contemplation of a painting. In this particular painting by Sigurðsson, the gazes of the characters/shadows are directed towards the background of the canvas. In Fried’s terms, they are absorbed by the contemplation of an object or action which remains invisible. Nonetheless, to the extent to which they share physical positions and a direction of the gaze with the beholder, a strong relationship is established between the former and the latter. This is therefore a case in which the painting is simultaneously both closed and open to the presence of the beholder. An analogous effect is obtained in some of the Quadri Specchianti paintings of Michelangelo Pistoletto, which show characters from behind, to which the reflections of beholders are added, such as in Tre ragazze alla balconata (Three Girls at the Balcony,1962-1964), I visitatori (The Visitors,1962-1968) or Uomo in piedi (Standing Man,1962-1982). But in the case of Sigurðsson’s painting, even if the shadow of the beholder, notwithstanding any shortcomings in the lighting of the museum or gallery in which it is being exhibited, does not blend in with those that are painted, there is nevertheless more than a common direction of the gaze between the characters/shadows and the beholder. The latter is in fact placed in the same situation of the body whose shadow has been fixed on the canvas.
As is often the case with Sigurðsson, the shadows of the 2004 painting, particularly those on the right, are not profile views. And yet we know from the silhouettes fashion at the end of the 18th century and Johann Caspar Lavater’s essays on physiognomy, that the face which defines the shadow must be in profile. When, in 1957, Marcel Duchamp made a self-portrait in the manner of a Lavater silhouette, his face is viewed in profile. Shadow silhouettes viewed face on and from the back are a lot rarer, since they are contrary to the identifying tradition of the silhouette. Sigurðsson’s first painting of a shadow is a self-portrait called Ma Seule Comparaison (My only comparison, 2001). The silhouette is not painted in profile, which for a self-portrait and its inherent identifying code, is markedly unorthodox. In his Autoritratto from 1979, an impression on canvas of a photograph taken by the artist of his shadow cast on a wall, Claudio Parmiggiani had chosen the same solution6. Since it does not show the outlines of the face, this shadow could be anybody’s. In the case of Sigurðsson’s shadows, renouncing the profile allows for an even stronger mimetic relationship between the beholder and the painted silhouettes.
In his paintings which depict the shadows of people, Sigurðsson seems to be reconnecting with the mythical origin of painting. We are, in fact, reminded of how Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, has no doubt about the origins of painting: the daughter of the potter Butades of Sicyon, “who was in love with a young man who was departing on a long voyage so she surrounded in a line the shadow of his face projected on the wall by the light of a lantern.” Thus the first painting is the reproduction of a projected shadow and, more specifically, the shadow of a precious being who is about to disappear. In other words, by fixing the shadow of a body on a surface, art, which initially provided a useful procedure for depiction, perhaps above all reveals its constitutive link to an ancient superstition: human beings have a double, which materialises itself in their shadows during their lifetimes and lives on in that form after their death. The original connection between art and shadows therefore acquires a kind of twofold dimension: as an illusionist device, but also a magical one in the fullest sense of the term. Many painters, throughout the centuries, have recognised or perpetuated this legendary origin7. Art historians often reference the Origine della pittura fresco painted by Giorgio Vasari in his Florentine home around 1570, which depicts a painter who is painting the shadow not of another person but his own on a surface, or La Invención de la pintura, which Bartolomé Esteban Murillo painted in 1660, by doubling the original scene, with the addition of a group of characters who are commenting on it, thus creating an authentic metapainting, which seems to simultaneously recognise the mythical story, while at the same time bearing witness to the progress that has been achieved since then in pictorial art. Right into the sparkling post-modernist era Pliny finds a new avatar, thanks to Komar &Melamid and The Origins of Socialist Realism (1982-1983), a monumental work which presents an allegory of painting by meticulously reproducing the outline of the shadow of Stalin’s face projected against a wall. And in this brief summary of such a long history, one should not forget the diktat Marcel Duchamp issues to himself in the notes he wrote between 1915 and 1923, and later collected in À L’infinitif /Boîte blanche/ (In the Infinitive/The White Box, 1966): “Make a picture of shadows cast […] the execution of the picture by means of luminous sources and by drawing the shadows on these plains by simply following the real projected outlines “8. It is most certainly this history and tradition – further enriched by the Schattenbilder (Shadow Pictures), which Gerhard Richter produced in 1968, or the nocturnal silhouettes ,which Ed Ruscha painted with aerosols in the second half of the 1980’s – that Sigurðsson’s paintings of shadows revives, but in a manner more akin to Duchamps, without having recourse to metapainting. In them, the lover of the potter’s daughter has taken leave forever and his shadow is left alone with itself.
Sigurðsson’s shadows are not only of people, however. Some are silhouettes of objects. There are the three enigmatic Rooms from 2002, which each display a chair and two pairs of open handcuffs hanging from the ceiling. Images of this kind evoke torture chambers. Like in the series of electric chairs produced by Andy Warhol in 1963, this ghostly image is an allegory of death, which at the same time represents the death of death. The room is empty, the body is absent. Even though it may evoke dictatorships or rooms that serve them, the Rooms also convey the artist’s constant dealings with the void, a point we will come back to. Other elements included in Sigurðsson’s shadow paintings are plants, which can be seen in several works, as well as a group of twenty-four photograhs, Jardin Vilayet, which were all made in 2003 during the artist’s stay in Bastia (Corsica)9. In this case, Sigurðsson does not produce his paintings from photographs, but from the real shadows of the plants projected by the sun onto the white canvases he had placed in the garden.
The most significant of these shadow paintings are probably those that reproduce the shadows of lamps and windows. Retina I and II (2004 and 2017) and Morning After. Effects of the Night Before (two versions from 2005 use the same image in different formats), which depict the shadows of chandeliers, stand out through a self-reflective dimension: the vehicle of the light here is a chandelier, which generates the shadows of other objects and which itself projects this shadow recorded on the canvas. Even if the titles suggest an optical dimension, they do more than that: they seem to designate the shadows as non-volatile images, retinal persistence effects; less therefore than shadows projected on the ground or a wall than on the retina.
In 1918, Marcel Duchamp decided to photograph the shadows cast by three of his works which he had hung from the ceiling of his New York studio: Sculpture de voyage (Sculpture for Travelling) and two ready-mades, Roue de bicyclette and Porte-chapeaux (Bicycle Wheel and Hat Rack). Sigurðsson’s lamps, following the example of the readymades photographed by Duchamp, are also suspended in the air. Of course, they resemble the Porte-chapeaux, particularly in the case of Retina I. We know that Duchamp would not limit himself to photographing the shadows of the Bicycle Wheel and Hat Rack. He also painted them in a picture, the same year as the photograph, with which he intended to definitively take leave of painting: Tu m’. But what was supposed to affirm the end of painting left a lasting impression on the retinas of painters.
The shadows cast by the lamps also engage in an objective relationship with a work which, like them, is a photo – painting: Flämische Krone (1965) by Gerhard Richter. The leakage of information in this case is not due to the fact that it is a shadow but a blurring of the image. Richter’s lamp is just as ghostly as Sigurðsson’s and, even though it is turned on, it does not seem to diffuse any light. It was not long, however, before Richter’s photo-paintings started to take an interest in shadows. As mentioned earlier, it was in 1968 that the first paintings of shadows appeared. These included the four Fenster: strange images because the window frames, which are visible in the foreground, seem to be projecting shadows on a vertical surface very close by. The shadows of Sigurðsson’s windows, on the other hand, are represented without the objects that generated them. The circumstances behind the genesis of two of them from 2007 are worth recounting. The artist was at the Picasso Museum in Paris when his attention was deflected from the paintings hanging on the walls to the shadows cast by the windows on the curtains, which he swiftly photographed. The two 2007 paintings therefore recorded what came between the sunlight and Picasso’s works. Above all, they focus on the shadowy part of these windows, which traditionally would be viewed as the metaphor of the painting. Here the veduta is blind.
Sigurðsson’s interest in cast shadows does not only manifest in their representation on canvas. Several of his works functionally incorporate the shadows which they project on the wall where they occur. This is the case in the canvas stretchers, like those that have long been used by painters, except that these are in coloured Plexiglas, which the artist is working on as this text is being written. There is no need to stretch a canvas on this stretcher to produce shadows, since it projects them itself. Other works do the same, such as his painted aluminium pieces, Tenging (Connection, 2017) and Rautt Samhengi (Red context 2018), which are founded on the molecular pattern already mentioned. These mural structures, even more than the shadows they cast, are noted for the optical illusions they create. Even though they are flat, they convey a sensation of volume thanks to the use of the laws of perspective. And the depth effect obtained in this manner is further reinforced by the shadows spread across the middle distance and the various nuances of grey which it regales the eye.
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If in the case of these mural sculptures, the shadow actively participates in the suggestion of volume, it is the void, the excavation, the hole, which forms the strongest relationship Sigurðsson engages in with his work. A piece from 1993, Perfect Garden, the first version of the garden imagined in the two paintings of the same title, clearly sheds light on that relationship. A garden is represented in three dimensions here in the form of a model. Spread across the view, along three circular arcs, are fourteen trees, spheres on stems, which have been coloured in green out of representative concerns. Basins seem to have been placed at the foot of each one, not so much to collect water as the shadows projected by the trees, thanks to a lamp fixed to one of the edges of the board. The shadow is in the hole. The shadow is a hole.
In the two Perfect Garden paintings, the central circle, which is devoid of any pictorial covering, is perceived by the eye as a void. Moreover, its dark colour tends to make it look like an area of shadow or like a hole. Several of Sigurðsson’s works develop the twofold theme of the hole and shadow. Should we be surprised? No, to the extent that the cast shadow is nothing other than a hole in the light. A very beautiful painting of the artist, The Scream (1999), depicts three disks which, through the perspective process, have been transformed into ellipses. The latter detach themselves from a yellow background, leaving three “holes” which reveal the raw canvas. They do not fail to project their respective shadows onto the background, slightly offset from the three holes. Beyond the reference to the work of Edward Munch – three holes like the eyes and the mouth – which could just as easily be a reference to Mickey10, this painting has the advantage of highlighting the two types of holes, without confusing them, made by the circular figure which is at the heart of the artist’s poetics: the hole in the light that is the shadow and the hole in the pictorial coating created by the birth of the figure carrying the shadow.
If the circles of raw canvas in the Perfect Garden and The Scream, like the shadows, only appear in their outline, the nature of the material they reveal endows them with an additional dimension. In fact, the raw canvas belongs less to painting, to the space of representative illusion, than to the object that is the support. It possesses a literal quality, which distances it from representation, even if, through the form which is given to the area where it appears, it also contributes to representation. In other words, and this is what is particularly striking in Perfect Garden, the central circle of raw canvas appears not only as the representation of a hole, but as a hole in the representation. While the figurative space is subject to the laws of perspective, it brings about a flatness which contradicts the depth of field. With this circle of raw canvas, everything occurs as if the image sees its spatial depth confronted with the plane reality of the painting.
But Sigurðsson’s circles do not always cast shadows. They can also be vectors of light. A magnificent painting from 1997 manifests this with the simplicity and rigour of a demonstration: perpendicular to the unpainted background of the painting, there is a representation of a yellow tier with a pierced centre which allows the light to penetrate through it; the unpainted canvas appears in the circle in the middle of the shadow projected by the tier. Works from an unusual series called Drifting Surface, which started in 2010, then continued in 2013 and again in 2018, deal with the same motif: on an also unpainted background, there are perforated tiers made of translucent material. The tiers project their shadows against the background while the light passes through the perforations. In this case, therefore, we are not presented with circles that obstruct the diffusion of light, but rather circles which enable the light to be transmitted. The interplay between the positive and negative image which, as a rule, is induced by the shadow lends itself to all kinds of reversibility. These works were preceded in 2005 by Indigo, Green and Yellow: three coloured glass tiers, fixed at a few centimetres from the wall; each of which is perforated by a dozen circles of varying diameters. These holes in the glass logically result in holes in the shadow projected by the plates on the wall. The shadow of a perforated plate, which entered into modern vocabulary with Licht Raum Modulator (Light Space Modulator, 1930) by Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, encounters a new avatar here. Since the shadow is a representation, perhaps it itself gains from being the subject of a representation. The two Drifting Surface paintings are more disturbing than the three Indigo, Green and Yellow tiers. They are charged with a tension between the depth of representative space and the flatness of the canvas, which, as already stated, makes the unpainted part even more sensitive. Moreover, paintings of this kind represent forms and effects through which constructivist art had precisely tried to escape representation. With Drifting Surface, we understand that abstraction is playing with fire by trying to come to terms with the shadow. The shadow, by its very ontology, belongs to the world of representation and drags into it any object whose shape it draws, however abstract it may be.
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If the cast shadow bears witness to the obstacle encountered by the light, photography is the result of a related phenomenon: a photo-sensitive surface has obstructed the luminous rays reflected by an object. It is therefore logical that Sigurðsson took an interest in photography and more specifically what comes outside the frame of the photographic image, that is to say the objects whose reflected luminous rays have not yet encountered the obstacle of the photosensitive paper. It was in 1992 that he embarked on a series that would come to be called Corrections. The artist acquired existing pictures, such as postcards found in flea markets, which he then corrected, not in the manner of the 1959 Modifications of Asger Jorn, who acquired pre-existing paintings to then profoundly change them, more often than not to point of virtual disfiguration. Indeed, in the first Corrections, Sigurðsson does not alter the photograph but only its perimeter, i.e. the sheet of white paper on which he has mounted it. Later, he will allow himself, but also with discretion and respect for the original image, either to correct a form or to add one or more elements.
As was to be expected, the subject of the first Correction was a shadow, specifically that of a dog, incomplete in the photograph. The corrector, using pencil and ink, has completed it on paper. It is as if it is unbearable for Sigurðsson that the framing of the photograph has truncated the shadow, which he undertakes to represent in its entirety. One has to restore the omission of shadows. Other Corrections also give shadows to people or objects that did not have any, or were very incomplete in the photograph. In these pieces, for example, the artist completes the shadows of two young newly weds (without them, let’s not forget Peter Schlemihl, their happiness would have certainly been compromised), a dromedary in the desert (one cannot deprive a being of his shadow under the scorching sun in the middle of the desert) or cable cars whose circular roofs look surprisingly like the disks floating in space in À flot or Continental Drift. Sigurðsson’s corrections, however, do not operate solely to the benefit of shadows. One of the found photographs shows an open-air painter who has placed his easel in a field between haystacks. The Correction completed the haystack which the framing had excluded. Sometimes the additions show the artist’s predilection for certain objects or forms. Some photographs showing games of pétanque or other ball games give him an opportunity to multiply the spheres he loves so much. In another picture he adds a further three central islands to an existing one, which resembles the basin in the Perfect Garden. Photographs of gardens around a castle enable him to continue alignments of trees akin to those in the Perfect Garden. The Corrections offer a new opportunity to enrich, not without humour, pictures of holes like those that feature in various paintings, such as those from which the ears of a rabbit appear as an “incorrectness” (Untitled painting, 1992, or the sculpture Diplomat, 1996). Thus the artist draws holes at the foot of a vaulting horse or a gymnastics bar, at one of the ends of a seesaw or in the middle of a game of Blind Man’s Bluff. When we measure, thanks to the Corrections, the space which spheres and holes occupy in Sigurðsson’s imagination, we can easily understand his longing to paint golf courses, particularly since they lend themselves to schematic representation: Par 5/3 for Cheats, Nine Course Golf Hole and Nine Hole Course-Paysage (all three in 1995) ‒ the latter painting transforms the nine sections of a golf course into a vertical landscape, floating one on top of the other in the ideal space of the painting where nothing needs to be corrected.
The shadow is what transports an object to another place from where it was. It is charged with an ecstatic force. The same principle of transportation, deportation and ecstasy is at the basis of Corrections: they compel the images to break out of the frames which the lens of the camera has given them. Perhaps this is what lies at the heart of Sigurðsson’s ars poetica: a form is unable to remain within itself. Let us come back one last time to the disks in The Scream: they have left a gap in their place of origin and, with their shadows, they now project a double of themselves. Sigurðsson’s circles definitively refuse to only exist within their circumferences.
Translated by Brian FitzGibbon
1 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad, New York, Grove Press, 1962.
2 Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The Strife of Love in a Dream, London, Thames & Hudson, 2003.
3 Peter Sloterdijk, Globes. Spheres II [1999], Cambridge, MIT Press, 2014, p. 13-43.
4 Voir Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer [1943/1955], Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006.
5 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot [1980], Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 92 and 103.
6 On this work see Georges Didi-Huberman, Génie du non-lieu. Air, poussière, empreinte, hantise, Paris, Minuit, 2001, p. 106.
7 See E. H. Gombrich’s Shadows. The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art [1995], New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014, and Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, London, Reaktion Books, 1997.
8 Michel Sanouillet (éd.), Duchamp du signe. Écrits de Marcel Duchamp, Paris, Flammarion, 1975, p. 103.
9 Le Vilayet St-Dominique is an area, which includes, among other things, an oriental garden, located by a perched village in the Bastian heights.
10 A small painting from 1993 of the same title, written at the bottom of the canvas, adopts a cartoon-like style in reference to Disney.