Between Object and Canvas. Halldor Bjorn Runolfsson.
There is a curious kind of continuity in Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson’s works which doesn’t reveal it self immediately but hides behind what at first glance appears to be a total change of direction. But we tend to forget how much his abstract works depended on observation of natural phenomena such as a cast shadow and its reflection. From the onset the effect of an object, as much as the object itself, has been a major concern of his, as an assertion of the fact that in a two-dimensional representation everything has an equal status, the immaterial shadow no less than the corporeal cucumber, to take an example of an object in an early work.
In the real world shadows are ephemeral effects without any apparent function other than to shield us from the sun. As such they are felt rather than seen; physically appreciated rather than perceived, or observed. In the abstract sphere they assume a precise role as a geometrical standard allowing the mathematician to measure entities far greater than the its scale. For Eratosthenes the shadow was a formidable device to measure earth’s surface. For the artist it either serves as a psychological trigger of impending suspense, as in Murnau’s Nosferatu and Reed’s Third Man, or as a spatial indicator where actual space is inexistent, as in two-dimensional pictures.
It is this latest example which applies to a wide range of Sigurdsson’s drawings and paintings where illusion is carried to a conceptual level of speculation. There are for instance the corrections, from 1990, where shadows are extended beyond the limits of the picture, causing a perceptual paradox which cannot be solved by the sight alone. It is as if the artist wanted to warn us not to rely unilaterally on perception. Beneath this caution one can detect a critical scepticism towards art’s dependence on virtual sensation, an illusion which we should have been able to put behind us when we ceased believing in the persuasive rhetoric of faithful representations.
At the same time Sigurdsson eschews representational problematic, either by dispatching them to an abstract sphere where they can be dealt with in an appropriate, but perfectly specific manner as specimen of study isolated from all disturbing elements, or by stripping them of their projective source and treating them as negative reflections of their dispelled object, which otherwise might have been the subject-matter of the work. In the first instance there are circles and discs which are basically abstract, two-dimensional, and branched together in a system similar to a chemical chart. Seen from another point of view these discs assume a substantial appearance by casting shadows to an undefined ground beneath. In the second instance the absent object determining the subject matter is only represented by the silhouette of a man, displayed from head to the waist, or a chair above which a pair of open hand-cuffs dangle as pendules in the air. These works, of uncannily human proportions are characterized by multilayered silhouettes on a curiously pulpy ground which seems to refer to the proximity of the flesh. Yet everything is impeccably controlled so nothing justifies an agitated response to the bewildering pith. Too much attention payed to the subject matter might even waver to pure sophistry.
Still, despite such anti-expressionistic depiction it is impossible to omit the disturbing content of Sigurdsson’s shadow-show as it goes hand in hand with a new technique and a new sense of pictorial order. What used to be centred, symmetrical and systematized is now thrown into an impressionistic disorder of pure immediacy. What used to be happily removed from all socio-psychological concerns is suddenly jeopardized by the wildest kind of behavioural insinuation. Yet, as the artist emphasizes, very little has changed. If there is a conversion it takes place in the space between the work and its public.
Halldór Björn Runólfsson,
2002.
There is a curious kind of continuity in Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson’s works which doesn’t reveal it self immediately but hides behind what at first glance appears to be a total change of direction. But we tend to forget how much his abstract works depended on observation of natural phenomena such as a cast shadow and its reflection. From the onset the effect of an object, as much as the object itself, has been a major concern of his, as an assertion of the fact that in a two-dimensional representation everything has an equal status, the immaterial shadow no less than the corporeal cucumber, to take an example of an object in an early work.
In the real world shadows are ephemeral effects without any apparent function other than to shield us from the sun. As such they are felt rather than seen; physically appreciated rather than perceived, or observed. In the abstract sphere they assume a precise role as a geometrical standard allowing the mathematician to measure entities far greater than the its scale. For Eratosthenes the shadow was a formidable device to measure earth’s surface. For the artist it either serves as a psychological trigger of impending suspense, as in Murnau’s Nosferatu and Reed’s Third Man, or as a spatial indicator where actual space is inexistent, as in two-dimensional pictures.
It is this latest example which applies to a wide range of Sigurdsson’s drawings and paintings where illusion is carried to a conceptual level of speculation. There are for instance the corrections, from 1990, where shadows are extended beyond the limits of the picture, causing a perceptual paradox which cannot be solved by the sight alone. It is as if the artist wanted to warn us not to rely unilaterally on perception. Beneath this caution one can detect a critical scepticism towards art’s dependence on virtual sensation, an illusion which we should have been able to put behind us when we ceased believing in the persuasive rhetoric of faithful representations.
At the same time Sigurdsson eschews representational problematic, either by dispatching them to an abstract sphere where they can be dealt with in an appropriate, but perfectly specific manner as specimen of study isolated from all disturbing elements, or by stripping them of their projective source and treating them as negative reflections of their dispelled object, which otherwise might have been the subject-matter of the work. In the first instance there are circles and discs which are basically abstract, two-dimensional, and branched together in a system similar to a chemical chart. Seen from another point of view these discs assume a substantial appearance by casting shadows to an undefined ground beneath. In the second instance the absent object determining the subject matter is only represented by the silhouette of a man, displayed from head to the waist, or a chair above which a pair of open hand-cuffs dangle as pendules in the air. These works, of uncannily human proportions are characterized by multilayered silhouettes on a curiously pulpy ground which seems to refer to the proximity of the flesh. Yet everything is impeccably controlled so nothing justifies an agitated response to the bewildering pith. Too much attention payed to the subject matter might even waver to pure sophistry.
Still, despite such anti-expressionistic depiction it is impossible to omit the disturbing content of Sigurdsson’s shadow-show as it goes hand in hand with a new technique and a new sense of pictorial order. What used to be centred, symmetrical and systematized is now thrown into an impressionistic disorder of pure immediacy. What used to be happily removed from all socio-psychological concerns is suddenly jeopardized by the wildest kind of behavioural insinuation. Yet, as the artist emphasizes, very little has changed. If there is a conversion it takes place in the space between the work and its public.
Halldór Björn Runólfsson,
2002.