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.