Painting and its Double. Bernard Marcadé
Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson: Painting and its Double
“The first painting” wrote Leonardo da Vinci, “was the linear outline of the shadow of a man thrown on the wall by the sun.” This statement is similar to the well known story told by Pliny the Elder who, in his Natural History, associated the beginnings of art with the drawing made by Dibutade, the daughter of a potter from Sycione, which she produced by tracing on a wall the outline of the shadow projected by the face of her lover, who was about to leave on a long voyage. This primitive scene is emblematic of the status of painting from ancient times to the present. Painting, of whatever kind, is always understood in a negative (in the photographic sense) context which places it under the dominion of shadows and under the rule of absence. This scenography is not unrelated to Plato’s famous allegory of the cave. From its foundation, then, painting has found itself confronted by a precariousness, that of having no other grounds for existence than the articulation of a loss Painting is the setting par excellence for a transaction between presence and absence, the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible.
The paintings and drawings of Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson are inscribed in this tradition of precariousness. Nothing in his work seems to require identification in a definitive way. Everything can be read and seen from various perspectives. We can of course recognize, here and there, recurring subjects and themes: mountains, bodies of water, the sky, animals, plants . . . But these natural elements also act in a phantasmic or even simply formal way . . . The naturalism of this painting is a sort of trap. The underlying pattern of each of these motifs is expressed in strange shapes where the betrothal of design and color, of background and figure, of masculine and feminine, is celebrated.
The paintings of Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson range mysteriously between verisimilitude and vision. His pictures never cease wandering between these two realms of image. With them we are in a land of ghosts and spectres. Each element depicted is comprehensible and at the same time incomprehensible; sometimes we can comprehend the form and not the meaning, and at other times it is the reverse. This art appears to be very static, and yet at any moment it is capable of upsetting its own certitudes. Each form is capable of turning back upon itself, sweeping away in this movement all the rules of identity and belonging.
The symmetry of most of these works is itself a source of disharmony and dissimilarity. Everything is in fact too easily subject to magnification or reduction for us not to have a feeling of the Unheimlich – Freud’s term for what is disturbing and strange precisely because of its too great familiarity.
The paintings of Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson are paintings of shadow and doubles. The artist, we realize, has discovered the native condition of painting, at the same time that he returns to ancient conceptions of the soul which make the double into an ambiguous mechanism, both protection an threat: “The double,” said Freud, “is a formation belonging to primitive psychological time, a long past when it no doubt had a more benevolent meaning. The double has been transformed into an image of terror in the same way that gods, after the fall of the religion to which they belonged, became demons.”
Painting is not pure,it is shot through with intensity and divergence. It is the primary setting for every form of duplicity and precariousness. This is the reason, apart from the hierarchic oppositions which structure its discourse (model/copy, form/matter, color/design, figure/background, representation/nonrepresentation...) why the history of this art is also to be understood as the most moving and the most developed expression of the oscillating play between transparency and opacity.
By exploiting paintings in its function a double of reality, Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson makes accessible to us a form of the Real, the vertiginous and labyrinthic form of The Circular Ruins, of The Garden of Forking Paths.* (*Works by Jorge Luis Borges). “Every duplication,” writes Clément Rossel in Le réel et son double, "implies an original and a copy, and one may well ask which one - the "other occurrence" or the real one – is the model, and which is the double. One then discovers that the "other occurrence" is not really the double of the real occurrence. It is in fact the reverse: the real occurrence itself appears to be the double of the "other occurrence". The result is that the real occurrence is, ultimately, "the other": the other is this Real, that is, the double of another Real which would be the Real itself, but which constantly eludes us and of which one can never say or know anything.”
When we confront the paintings of Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson, which never cease to baffle the naturalistic and mimetic logic of representation by means of a language which nonetheless rises from natural forms, how are we not to evoke the anamorphic phantom which floats on the foreground of The Ambassadors by Holbein? This vanitas, which scarcely dares to utter its name, is the represented incarnation of the instability of the forms of the world.
Bernard Marcadé,
1994.
Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson: Painting and its Double
“The first painting” wrote Leonardo da Vinci, “was the linear outline of the shadow of a man thrown on the wall by the sun.” This statement is similar to the well known story told by Pliny the Elder who, in his Natural History, associated the beginnings of art with the drawing made by Dibutade, the daughter of a potter from Sycione, which she produced by tracing on a wall the outline of the shadow projected by the face of her lover, who was about to leave on a long voyage. This primitive scene is emblematic of the status of painting from ancient times to the present. Painting, of whatever kind, is always understood in a negative (in the photographic sense) context which places it under the dominion of shadows and under the rule of absence. This scenography is not unrelated to Plato’s famous allegory of the cave. From its foundation, then, painting has found itself confronted by a precariousness, that of having no other grounds for existence than the articulation of a loss Painting is the setting par excellence for a transaction between presence and absence, the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible.
The paintings and drawings of Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson are inscribed in this tradition of precariousness. Nothing in his work seems to require identification in a definitive way. Everything can be read and seen from various perspectives. We can of course recognize, here and there, recurring subjects and themes: mountains, bodies of water, the sky, animals, plants . . . But these natural elements also act in a phantasmic or even simply formal way . . . The naturalism of this painting is a sort of trap. The underlying pattern of each of these motifs is expressed in strange shapes where the betrothal of design and color, of background and figure, of masculine and feminine, is celebrated.
The paintings of Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson range mysteriously between verisimilitude and vision. His pictures never cease wandering between these two realms of image. With them we are in a land of ghosts and spectres. Each element depicted is comprehensible and at the same time incomprehensible; sometimes we can comprehend the form and not the meaning, and at other times it is the reverse. This art appears to be very static, and yet at any moment it is capable of upsetting its own certitudes. Each form is capable of turning back upon itself, sweeping away in this movement all the rules of identity and belonging.
The symmetry of most of these works is itself a source of disharmony and dissimilarity. Everything is in fact too easily subject to magnification or reduction for us not to have a feeling of the Unheimlich – Freud’s term for what is disturbing and strange precisely because of its too great familiarity.
The paintings of Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson are paintings of shadow and doubles. The artist, we realize, has discovered the native condition of painting, at the same time that he returns to ancient conceptions of the soul which make the double into an ambiguous mechanism, both protection an threat: “The double,” said Freud, “is a formation belonging to primitive psychological time, a long past when it no doubt had a more benevolent meaning. The double has been transformed into an image of terror in the same way that gods, after the fall of the religion to which they belonged, became demons.”
Painting is not pure,it is shot through with intensity and divergence. It is the primary setting for every form of duplicity and precariousness. This is the reason, apart from the hierarchic oppositions which structure its discourse (model/copy, form/matter, color/design, figure/background, representation/nonrepresentation...) why the history of this art is also to be understood as the most moving and the most developed expression of the oscillating play between transparency and opacity.
By exploiting paintings in its function a double of reality, Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson makes accessible to us a form of the Real, the vertiginous and labyrinthic form of The Circular Ruins, of The Garden of Forking Paths.* (*Works by Jorge Luis Borges). “Every duplication,” writes Clément Rossel in Le réel et son double, "implies an original and a copy, and one may well ask which one - the "other occurrence" or the real one – is the model, and which is the double. One then discovers that the "other occurrence" is not really the double of the real occurrence. It is in fact the reverse: the real occurrence itself appears to be the double of the "other occurrence". The result is that the real occurrence is, ultimately, "the other": the other is this Real, that is, the double of another Real which would be the Real itself, but which constantly eludes us and of which one can never say or know anything.”
When we confront the paintings of Sigurdur Árni Sigurdsson, which never cease to baffle the naturalistic and mimetic logic of representation by means of a language which nonetheless rises from natural forms, how are we not to evoke the anamorphic phantom which floats on the foreground of The Ambassadors by Holbein? This vanitas, which scarcely dares to utter its name, is the represented incarnation of the instability of the forms of the world.
Bernard Marcadé,
1994.