FRAC Corse, France. 2012

Gardens of Shadow.

Christophe Domino

The Gardens of Shadow exhibition at the FRAC (Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain) of Corsica in Corte, offers a clear reading of Sigurdur Arni Sigurdsson works, an Icelandic artist familiar with France, where he stays regularly. Having studied in Paris at the end of the 1980s at the ENSACP, École National Supérieur d´Arts de Paris Cergy and Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastique (1991), but also marked by the history of Icelandic art, Sigurdur Arni keeps developing a thoughtful approach to space and its abstractness, often through painting, but also through volumes, architecture and photography. Whenever present in his artwork, the image is meant above all to make the manifest and baffling experience of space perceptible. Immaterial per se, essential to our lives yet impalpable, space can nevertheless reveal itself in specific conditions: it never exposes itself as such but appears clearly in between things, between bodies. It signals its presence, in particular through the boundless and elemental phenomenon of the Shadow.

Sigurdur Arni’s attachment to the planar canvas – and by the same token, but not exclusively, to painting itself – is more understandable when you reflect that it is the plane which enables us to capture space: it is always through the way it projects itself onto a surface that its three dimensions manifest themselves. Whether we think of the ancient myth of potter Butades’s daughter who, according to Plinius, traced the silhouetted profile of her departing lover on a wall in Plato’s cavern, but also of the invention of cartography or the technique of cinema – image and space are interconnected through projection. The daily lesson in geometry of the sun is a sufficient demonstration of that, and even more so when it becomes as scarce as wintertime Iceland.

However, Sigurdur Arni’s artwork appears remote from any philosophical abstraction; quite to the contrary, the artist seems to show the obviousness of space with the simplest means. His painting steers clear of conspicuous effects. His colours are solid, almost monochrome surfaces, the hues rather restrained, the canvas sometimes left bare. The figures represented are at times geometric (circles, holes), at times stylized shapes – often trees, atom-like structures, human silhouettes, some objects. However, the figure is probably not of paramount importance, nor the surrounding spaces. No, the subject painted by Sigurdur Arni is rather the projection of those shapes, their imprint, their shadow, suggesting how space is travelled through by light. The art pieces gathered at the FRAC Corse display various approaches in the artist’s work – paintings, installations, photos – pursuing that same concern. The most recent paintings – the latest only a few weeks old – echo with photographs taken in a Bastia garden in 2003, during an artist residency. And, from the FRAC collections, the Model for a Landscape installation (1995) is a model of a park with geometrically stylized trees lit by a light bulb, casting radiating shadows – an ideal, but also unsettling kind of nature, which does not hide its shady side.

Sigurdur Arni Sigurdsson has been exhibiting his work since 1988. In 1990, he took part in the Summer Workshops in Séte, then in several CRAC (Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain) exhibitions. He participated in Ateliers de l´ARC 1992, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. He represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and his work is regularly shown in Iceland. He has also had exhibitions in the U.S., Russia, countries across Northern Europe and France, where his work is regularly exhibited, at the Aline Vidal Gallery in Paris, Domi Nostrae Gallery in Lyons and Iconoscope Gallery in Montpellier. He has stayed in Corsica on many occasions and participated in several FRAC group shows.

LAC Lieu d’Art Contemporain, Sigean, France. 2015

Listasafnið á Akureyri, Iceland. 2018

Drifting Surfaces

Markús Þór Andrésson, Director of Reykjavik Art Museum.

Through his career, Sigurður Árni Sigurðsson has made countless variations of the painting as a medium and experimented with its possibilities. His experiments have often led him into the realms of space, either with various two-dimentional spectacles or with the creation of three-dimentional objects. The play and interplay of light and shadow is a recurring theme in his work. In a large painting, made especially to celebrate the opening of the Akureyri Museums new showrooms, Sigurður depicts the shadow silhouette of the distinctive windows of the old Dairy Coop, KEA, that used to reside in the building. Light seems to flood in through the long windows, break on the contours of the horizontal windowposts, and fall onto the blank canvas. Albeit, this is a visual deception, the whole scenery is painted, the light as well as the shadows. There is also a real wall between the windows and the painting, so the optical illusion immediately reveals itself. The sunlight, sailing its own course in the actual window-space, is also arrested in a painting in the inner space. What motion is the artist referring to in an exhibition he calls Drifting Surfaces?

Sigurður Árni’s works are filled with contradictions that at first glance seem to be irrelevant, but gradually twist the outcome, so one has to take a closer look. The simple interaction of geometric shapes on blank or painted canvas, in a nameless, blue- and greenish painting, develops a visual illusion. A closer inspection leads one to speculations about the history of painting altogether, and its constant struggle between subject and content. Though a painting is in itself an extremely thin surface, it can portray and hint at every possible width of the physical and imaginary world.

Painting, its tradition and background, are Sigurður’s main subject but he has always used other medium’s as well. In recent years he’s been working on reliefs. The works are carved into aluminum thins, some of which are coloured and lacquered. They are mounted with a surplus space between the works and the wall, so the works cast shadows on it, whether it is daylight or electric light. The shapes are either inter-connected dots reminiscent of molecule diagrams, lines that form polygons waving towards natural forms, or the complex structure of spirals. First and foremost they are an abstract puzzle with dimensions, the gap between the two- and three-dimensional, foreground and background – the borders of a drawing or painting on the one hand, and a sculpture on the other.

At first glance, Sigurður’s reliefs seem to be made out of found material, shapes derived from natural or digital models, cast in a mold and covered in pigment, a process similar to a manufacturing industrial products. A closer look reveals that the framework are abstract drawings by the artist, processed in a way that almost eradicates the human touch. Some of the reliefs are based on Voronoi diagrams; a natural algorythm to be found all around us. The Russian mathematician Georgy Voronoi defined the system in the 19th century: It explains how a plane partitions in the weakest place between two points. This is the form and structure of columnar igneous rock, stone polygons, a giraffe’s pattern etc. Voronoi diagrams are to be found in the smallest particles of substance matter as well as in cosmic dimensions of the universe. The same applies to the spiral, or the helix, presented in Sigurður’s works. It has a similar absolute value found in nature on various scale in the world. Voronoi diagrams and helixes both refer to infinity.

These works arouse a feeling for a vast, limitless space with no actual center or special visual importance. The recurring shapes seem to be able to expand in any direction, without being restrained by a frame or other external borders. This is emphasized by placing them as if floating in the air. The works do not contain a visible order, though they indeed form some kind of a pattern. Familiar ideology comes to mind, on inherent instability of both language and meaning. Late in the twentieth century, scholars started referring to the concept of root systems “rhizomes” and existentialism, instead of center or core. One could say that with these works, Sigurður opens various visual portals into the worlds of materialism and idealism.

Sigurður’s works objectify the idea that man only senses the world in brief glimpses; as parts of a whole or a moment in eternity. Man’s visual area and other senses have their limits, and our sense of things largely relies on our preconception of experience and understanding. Our mind assumes to fill into the gaps of our knowledge of the world, conclude about progress and come up with the most likely and plausible outcome. Sigurður reminds us about this unconscious ability in a simple but incisive way through his works: There’s an invisible line between a painting and the whole world outside of it; we consciously enter the painting’s illusion, yet a similar illusion can apply to all our surroundings. Not only does the artist point out that our perception and knowledge is fallible, but that the world is also prone to constant progress. Concepts such as parameter or constant, neither have the same meaning for two persons who experience the world differently, nor is it ever the same from one moment to the next. Hence, everything is moving, unsteady images, neverending vortex and drifting surfaces.

Hverfisgallerí, Reykjavik, Iceland