Category: Exhibitions

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

Hverfisgallerí, Reykjavik, Iceland. 2019

Found Objects and Lost Time in Sigurður Árni Sigurðsson’s Corrections

Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir.

In 1990, Sigurður Árni found a black-and-white photograph of a dog in a flea market in Sète in the south of France. The strange shadows cast by the dog in the bright sunlight caught the artist´s eye. The photo lay on his desk for a while before he decided to glue it onto a piece of paper and bring the dog back to life, breaking its way out of the frame by creating its strange double he named Found Dog. The image of the dog and its shadows mark the beginning of a series of works which has since been growing and developing under the title Corrections.

The first Corrections were exhibited in Sigurður Árni’s retrospective in Reykjavík Art Museum at Kjarvalsstaðir in 1994. Since then, scores of images hav e been added to the series which now hold around 200 works. The series reflects the artist’s passion for found photographs and postcards which he discovers in flea markets and second-hand bookstores during his travels abroad, particularly in France. It’s probably more accurate to say that the images appear to him during his strolls, like memories which surface when you least expect it. Often, the photographs lie unused with the artist until they find their target. They might even address him and remind him of their existence, like a dog which wanders into the photo frame at the wrong moment. The world turns into a stage in front of the camera, everything that is staged becomes a symbol. Even a dog, minding its own doggy business, becomes an actor when the lens is pointed at it.

Most of the Corrections are closely connected to French culture, a certain time and place, as is the case with the photograph of cyclist Lance Armstrong, or the exit of the unknown bride and groom. A young woman takes on the role of a Sunday painter where she sits, all dressed up, in a field in front of her easel in the postcard L’artiste et le modèle. Traditional salt mining on a distant sunny shore transforms into a peculiar, geometric landscape or modern landscape – Paysage moderne. Here, each character plays himself. The surroundings are affected by the presence of the French bombshell Brigitte Bardot, who enters eternity as the irresistible BB. The Breton schoolgirls become actors in an erotic landscape series around phallic menhirs. Even an innocent family picnic becomes laughable in the context of a funny French advertisement with the famous Michelin Man.

The cultural history, however, is irrelevant, as this has a different purpose. Sigurður Árni gives titles to some of the images, writes them lightly in pencil at the bottom of the sheet, and the text reflects his personal connection to the subject.

Al though most of the postcards have inscriptions in French, information about time and place are of little matter, after the artist´s interference. Photographs of mundane activities and well-known situations offer various interpretations and improvisations in the artist’s rhetorical play. Haycocks with old-fashioned canvas covers appear as strange, erotic symbols from the past at the farm Svínafell in Öræfi. Three Young Puffins is a pun on an advertisement depicting three blondes in the Blue Lagoon. They are dressed in colourful swimsuits, two in yellow, one in red, and their supple bodies echo the three young puffins with their yellow and red beaks, joining colours and images in an ambiguous tourist symbol and a droll wordplay.

The mind play which Sigurður sets in motion in Corrections, is in many ways reminiscent of the writings of French semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-1980), about the rhetorical function of images, but also of his more personal interpretation of the studium and punctum factors of photographs. The studium characteristics of Corrections are familiar to the viewer: Bride and groom exiting the church, children on a see saw, dog walking in the sun, everybody knows the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Other points pierce the viewers and affect them deeply, activate the imagination or cause a chill, like a bad omen of what is to come. Such effects interrupt the whole, because as Barthes described, punctum is an interruption similar to a sting, speck, cut, a little hole – and also cast of the dice. ¹

In this manner, Sigurður disturbs the image when he gently draws on it. By disrupting the frame and extending the image, he not only changes the composition and various details within the image, but also transforms the punctum effects of the photograph and simultaneously it´s status as a photograph, documentation and a narrative. The viewer cannot be sure what is original and what’s been added. Thus, the additions create a new context, they pull the postcards from the past, into the present, where time and place is forgotten or no longer relevant. A dark spot, hole or a throw of the dice can transform each Correction into a scene, independent from its frame. A photograph of an empty gymnasium calls out for some participants, while other pictures which portray children at play stir up an uncanny feeling of what is to come, a foreboding of the familiar situation.

Sigurður Árni’s selection of images might surprise the viewer and it could prove difficult to find the thread that connects the photographs. Each image sparks different speculations and ideas of the characters and items which come alive in Corrections. Some of the images belong to postcard series, others stand alone. Evidently each image also belong to a another and a larger context in the mind of the artist as well as the viewer, where each person creates their own narrative.

Sigurður Árni allows French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887– 1968) to set the stage for the series in the image Mr. Duchien, -with tongue in cheek. The title is a direct quote to the first image in the series, the origin of the work, i.e. Found Dog, which also refers to Sigurður’s dialogue with Duchamp’s famous selfportrait, With My Tongue in My Cheek (1959) where Duchamp extended his own profile, cast in plaster, with gentle pencil lines. With Mr. Duchien, -with tongue in cheek, Sigurður also breaks the principle of Corrections, in that he is not extending a photograph but giving extended life to a found stone (which resembles a dog’s head), he mimics Duchamp’s pun and gives him a gentlemanly nod at the same time.

In a famous lecture on “The Creative Act”, Duchamp defined art as a missing link. He believed art could be found in the space in-between things, rather than in that which is visible. ² Therefore, it seems safe to claim that the Corrections are a kind of metaphor for art itself and the struggle with creation, for the gap which appears, as Duchamp described it, in the infrathin, in the intervention which is almost imperceptible, in the feeling which Duchamp claimed one could describe but not define, that which appears in the metaphor of oblivion, in the shiny surface of the mirror or in the lingering warmth when you rise from your chair. ³

In her famous article, “In Plato’s Cave”, the U.S critic and author Susan Sontag (1933–2004) made the claim that all photographs are a reminder of death: “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” ⁴ Sigurður Árni’s intervention allows him to loosen these restrictions of the photograph, it thaws and comes alive in the drawing which cuts it loose from the frame. The intervention, the addition, the shadow or the hole which Sigurður adds to the surface takes over and matters more than the original image. The drawing’s friction against the photograph also reminds us that photography has not always been a bearer of truth, as we often claim it is. During the latter half of the 19th century, drawn images were considered more scientific and trustworthy than photos. Even today, a drawing of a plant is believed to be a more exact copy of the real object than a photograph. By combining these two different media in one image, Sigurður Árni erases the time limits, creating artwork which transcends time. In doing so he disarranges the connection between the original and the copy, and transforms Corrections into a metaphor of the art creation itself, within a much larger conceptual context.

As Sigurður Árni himself has said, Corrections play a particular role in his creative process. Although his work is meticulously planned, he starts correcting photographs and postcards to free himself of blockage, get his creativity flowing, a situation which could be likened to a method which the French Surrealist and author André Breton (1896–1966) called automatism. Its purpose was to free the artist from psychological restraints and liberate his imagination. Therefore, the artist’s intervention could be connected to the search for the manifestations of the dream, as was practiced within surreal aesthetics where the subconscious was considered the only true reality. Breton looked to Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) theories about the subconscious and hoped to create a new creative thought which would be a direct expression of the unbridled imagination. Therefore, it might be assumed that Sigurður transfers Breton’s questioning about the abolition of the binary oppositions; life and death, past and future, real and imaginary, compatible and incompatible, thus gaining a Surrealist action in the attraction between drawing and photograph. ⁵ Hence, Corrections are Sigurður’s way to maintain the spark in some kind of a Divine Comedy, where the artist travels alone in No Man’s Land, looking for a partner. The rhetoric of painting and writing has been forgotten by most people and the artist, as well as the viewers, must make do with the echo in Plato’s cave – or maybe we should rather view Corrections as a testimony of the moment when humour forges its way to the surface, in the self-irony which has characterised art from the very first days of found things.

1 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie, Paris: Gallimard, 1980, p. 49.

2 Marcel Duchamp, „The Creative Act,“ Art News, 56:4 (summer 1957), p. 28-29.

3 Marcel Duchamp, Notes, Paris: Flammarion, 1999, p. 21.

4 Susan Sontag, „In Plato‘s Cave,“ On Photography, New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, p. 15.

5 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism,The University of Michigan Press, 1972.

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

Y gallery, Kópavogur, Iceland. 2023

Heilagir Skuggar

Jón Proppé

Við eigum okkur öll eins konar hliðarsjálf sem birtist helst þegar sólin skín og fylgir okkur þá hvert sem við förum. Skugginn er jafn persónulegur og líkami okkar; hann er hluti af okkur en þó utan við okkur. Meðal flestra þjóða hefur þetta orðið að umhugsunarefni og hefur fólki þótt að ýmislegt þurfi að varast. Í Kína verður maður að passa að skugginn varpist ekki á opna gröf, því þá gæti maður dáið. Galdramenn geta náð valdi á skugga okkar og víða hefur fólk varast að vera á ferð úti um miðjan dag því þá er skugginn lítill og veikur, og maður því berskjaldaðri en að morgni eða síðdegis. Samt er skugginn líka varhugaverður. Hann er skuggahliðin á okkur – skuggalegur fylgisveinn sem við getum ekki hrakið frá okkur. Margir hafa talið að sálin búi í skugganum enda hverfur hann á braut þegar við deyjum og erum grafin – þegar okkur er „stefnt inn í skugganna fjölmenna ríki“, eins og Jón Helgason orti. Hinir framliðnu eru skuggar. Í teikninámi er nemendum hins vegar snemma kennt að „skyggja“ til að myndin verði „lifandi“ og fái á sig sterkari veruleikablæ. Myndir án skugga eru bara tvívíðir og líflausir fletir. Það eru margar hliðar á skugganum.

Sigurður Árni Sigurðsson hefur lengi verið hugfanginn af skuggum og skoðað þá frá ýmsum hliðum í málverkum sínum og skúlptúrum. Með skuggum verður til rými og Sigurður Árni hefur meðal annars beitt þeim til að búa til rými milli strigans og málaðra flata. Hann hefur líka málað myndir sem sýna bara skuggann af hlutnum en ekki hlutinn sjálfan. Þau verk trufla skynjunina því manni er hætt við að fara að horfa í kringum sig til að sjá hvað varpi skugganum: Ef aðeins skugginn sést á veggnum hlýtur myndefnið að standa við hliðina á mér í sýningarsalnum.

Málið flækist enn frekar ef margir ljósgjafar eru í rýminu því þá getur sami hlutur varpað mörgum skuggum í einu og það virkar undarlega á mann. Þetta getur valdið vandræðum á höggmyndasýningum og þar sem líkneski eru höfð í kirkjum og hofum, til dæmis í kaþólskum kirkjum. Í nýjustu verkum sínum fæst Sigurður Árni við þetta vandamál: Styttan af dýrlingnum varpar tveimur ólíkum skuggum og ef við tökum styttuna úr myndinni, eins og Sigurður Árni gerir, eru eftir tveir ólíkir dýrlingar. Í kaþólskri trú er oft ekki langt á milli myndar og þeirrar andlegu veru sem myndin sýnir, enda fer fólk til kirkju og biður bænir við myndirnar. Kirkjuþing hafa verið haldin til að greiða úr þessari flækju en með takmörkuðum árangri. Hvar er þá dýrlingurinn? Á sýningu Sigurðar hefur hann búið til styttu úr skuggunum og í sýningarrýminu snýst hún á stöpli og varpar skuggum í allar áttir. Þeir sem koma á sýninguna geta svo séð skuggana af sjálfum sér innan um. Kannski er það eins konar tilbeiðsla?

Skuggar eru raunverulegir, og þó ekki, en samt. Það eru tvær hliðar á hverju máli og stundum er skuggahliðin áhugaverðari.

Saint Genevieve et Notre dame de Montmartre. Watercolor, 76X57cm. 2023.

Ásmundarsalur, Reykjavik, Iceland. 2025

Adrift in Colour

Jón Proppé

Everything is: the shadows in the glass

Which, in between the day’s two twilights, you

Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew

Henceforward in the mirrors that you pass.

And everything is part of that diverse

Crystalline memory; the universe.

– Jorge Louis Borges

Paintings are two dimensional, flat surfaces that can be covered with a layer of paint, thick or thin, while sculptures — like us and all ordinary things — have three dimensions. Sculptures share our space; paintings are more like the walls or floors of our dwellings.

That was how it was, at least, until painters began experimenting with perspective and found ways to create the illusion of space inside their paintings. Then the painting became like a window: a flat object you could look through and see a world — or an invention — in three dimensions. Painters got so good at this that they sometimes tried to “deceive the eye” — trompe-l’œil — so that people thought what they saw in the painting was real, at least until they looked more carefully. Even when you know it’s a trick, it can still be a treat, still bring you joy.

That’s how it was, for example, when Icelandic farmers moved into towns and missed their old homes. Some would buy a painting of the mountain they had grown up with, and it felt almost like looking out through the window back home. Paintings, like windows — and sometimes like mirrors — can expand the space they are in. Every interior designer knows this.

The three-dimensional space we and the sculptures live in isn’t as simple as it seems. It can be bent, stretched, or reimagined in many ways. This has been one of Sigurður Árni’s main subjects. He has painted surfaces where he leaves gaps in the paint so you can see the canvas underneath, creating shadows that make the paint seem to float above the surface. He has played with shadows, hinting at objects that don’t really exist — showing us reality in the shadow but making the object itself disappear. In his series Corrections, where he draws on old postcards, he often uses shadows to shift or add to what’s pictured. He has also used tinted transparent materials to cast coloured shadows, making three-dimensional shapes that only exist on the retina of the viewer.

As strange as it sounds, you could say that Sigurður Árni treats paint as if it were a three-dimensional material — and at the same time, he flattens three-dimensional things back into two dimensions. But this isn’t just some visual game, like a funhouse of mirrors. The space we move through is the context of our lives; it shapes how we experience the world and how we move in it. It is important that we understand what space does — and what it can do. Sigurður Árni’s works are part of that task: breaking our habits of perception and making us think differently about our surroundings.

In Litarek, his new exhibition at Ásmundarsalur, we see large paintings where he once again exposes the space between paint and canvas, this time dividing the surface into fields of colour that seem to float above the canvas instead of blending into it. Especially striking, however, are the new works where he uses mirrors and metal pipes, bent to form sections of a circle. The mirrors reflect the space and a part of the circle — but inside the mirror, strangely enough, the circle becomes whole. The reflection shows the real space around us, but also something that doesn’t exist in the real world, a kind of addition to reality that only exists in the mirror — just like the spaces that Sigurður Árni conjures in the shadows of his work that live in the viewer mind. And then again: perhaps, as Borges suggested, these are all just aspects of our lived universe.