Paradise Reclaimed. Audur Ólafsóttir.
Paradise reclaimed
When does a painting become a painting, and to what extent can you subvert some of its basic characteristics before it stops being a painting?
The work of Sigurdur Arni Sigurdsson turns in the main on the in-built unreliability of painting as a purveyor of three-dimensional reality. A painting is fabricated reality, “a convincing artificial world.”
In order both to define and expand the possibilities an boundaries of painting, Sigurdsson has chosen to work within its traditions. His particular experimental field is the two-dimensional stage of picture plane. Regarding his works as a “dialogue with the history of painting”, Sigurdsson chooses to register his observations through the techniques of traditional painting, through the application of oil on canvas. By depicting deception and its unmasking on the same plane, he turns the viewer into an accessory in his endeavour. But even through Sigurdsson regards his own painting procedure with a grain of salt, he has managed to create an unusual pictorial world permeated with lyricism and unreality, a world founded on a very personal and often self referential visual language.
The two-dimensionality of the picture plane, i.e. the thin veneer that a painting presents to the world, has given the artist an opportunity to field usual statements about the main conceptual premises of painting, the relationship between foreground and background, the subject/ground dichotomy and the role of the canvas.
Sigurdsson’s re-examination of the foreground-background relationship and of the hitherto undefined area between the two is one of the central aspects of his art.
In dealing with the background Sigurdsson has turned the area between foreground and background into his chief experimental field. To him, it is an area of immense dimensions, whether from a historical or formal point of view. “Anything can happen in this area, including things that we are unable to see; there are endless possibilities there.” *
Circular “perforations” or “holes” of various kinds are the foundations of his unusual visual language. These “holes” and other variations on the round form: balls, spheres, domes, circles, eggs, eyes, along with round lakes and round-shaped trees are some of the tacks that the painter deploys in his attempt to mediate between the pictorial worlds or spatial layers in his paintings, as well as between the background and the subject. His paintings are no longer a window on the world, but a spy hole that allows us to see in between the painted planes.
“My “perforated” paintings centre on the attempt to reach through the paint to the bare canvas beyond it, in effect to create a world in between the oil paint and the canvas. Thus painting acquires a new dimension in a mysterious area beyond paint. “Perforations are also interesting because of their reference to another world, they urge the viewer to look into them and see what is inside or behind.”
The painter’s strategy centres chiefly on a common visual deception, the idea of forms resting “on” a background. One of the methods that he applies in order to turn subject matter into background and background into foreground is to have the unpainted “natural”canvas assume the position of subject matter, while covering the background, i.e. the surrounding area, with a monochrome colour.
Not surprisingly, the painter’s formal investigation have centered on landscape/nature. Historically Icelandic painting has long used landscape as a point of departure; landscape/nature also provides the painter with a “realistic” point of reference.
Sigurdsson´s landscapes have evolved from mountain views, an archetypal subject matter in Icelandic art, to the landscaped parks of European art history. Romanticism hardly enters into Sigurdsson’s landscapes. The show none of the chaos of nature, designed, re-structured; showcase hedges, triangular trees, geometrically perfect fields, golf courses. His nature is symmetrical, the nature of religious harmony, a nature both unreal and artificial. Even the green colour, nature’s very own signature, permeating these landscape paintings, cannot be found in nature, but provides a reference to “the original paradisiacal state. For Paradise means garden.”
The surface of Sigurdsson’s paintings is at all times smooth and unmarked, with no brushstrokes in evidence. The oil colours serve the sole purpose of connecting the painter to the history of art.
Sigurdsson’s historical references also involve the concepts of abstraction-figuration. Why are the same shapes sometimes seen as abstract, and other times as figurative? For this painter, the difference lies in the shadows.
Thus his paintings of open fields are evenly squared like abstract-geometric paintings. Only the shadows snaking along the irrigation ditches and roads provide a reference to a concrete subject matter. The open field, representing nature/landscape, also accords perfectly with Sigurdsson’s artistic aims, since it mimics the pictorial plane in its flatness. By rearranging traditional perspective an tilting the painted field, eventually to place it flat on a wall, the subject matter may be said to correspond exactly to these essence of painting; in effect you have a painting in harmony with itself.
The three-dimensional models (“Ideas for Gardens”) which the artist works on concurrently with the paintings can also be seen as their logical extensions. Basically, the models, like the paintings, are about the play of shadows, the relationship of light and shadow. In the models the painter makes deception visible by creating an utterly “real” artificial world, complete with artificial lighting and artificial shadows which do not withstand rational scrutiny (no more than the restructured nature that we find in the paintings).
*(All direct quotations are taken from an interview with the artist by the autor.)
Audur Olafsdottir, 1999.
(Art historian at the University of Iceland?)
Paradise reclaimed
When does a painting become a painting, and to what extent can you subvert some of its basic characteristics before it stops being a painting?
The work of Sigurdur Arni Sigurdsson turns in the main on the in-built unreliability of painting as a purveyor of three-dimensional reality. A painting is fabricated reality, “a convincing artificial world.”
In order both to define and expand the possibilities an boundaries of painting, Sigurdsson has chosen to work within its traditions. His particular experimental field is the two-dimensional stage of picture plane. Regarding his works as a “dialogue with the history of painting”, Sigurdsson chooses to register his observations through the techniques of traditional painting, through the application of oil on canvas. By depicting deception and its unmasking on the same plane, he turns the viewer into an accessory in his endeavour. But even through Sigurdsson regards his own painting procedure with a grain of salt, he has managed to create an unusual pictorial world permeated with lyricism and unreality, a world founded on a very personal and often self referential visual language.
The two-dimensionality of the picture plane, i.e. the thin veneer that a painting presents to the world, has given the artist an opportunity to field usual statements about the main conceptual premises of painting, the relationship between foreground and background, the subject/ground dichotomy and the role of the canvas.
Sigurdsson’s re-examination of the foreground-background relationship and of the hitherto undefined area between the two is one of the central aspects of his art.
In dealing with the background Sigurdsson has turned the area between foreground and background into his chief experimental field. To him, it is an area of immense dimensions, whether from a historical or formal point of view. “Anything can happen in this area, including things that we are unable to see; there are endless possibilities there.” *
Circular “perforations” or “holes” of various kinds are the foundations of his unusual visual language. These “holes” and other variations on the round form: balls, spheres, domes, circles, eggs, eyes, along with round lakes and round-shaped trees are some of the tacks that the painter deploys in his attempt to mediate between the pictorial worlds or spatial layers in his paintings, as well as between the background and the subject. His paintings are no longer a window on the world, but a spy hole that allows us to see in between the painted planes.
“My “perforated” paintings centre on the attempt to reach through the paint to the bare canvas beyond it, in effect to create a world in between the oil paint and the canvas. Thus painting acquires a new dimension in a mysterious area beyond paint. “Perforations are also interesting because of their reference to another world, they urge the viewer to look into them and see what is inside or behind.”
The painter’s strategy centres chiefly on a common visual deception, the idea of forms resting “on” a background. One of the methods that he applies in order to turn subject matter into background and background into foreground is to have the unpainted “natural”canvas assume the position of subject matter, while covering the background, i.e. the surrounding area, with a monochrome colour.
Not surprisingly, the painter’s formal investigation have centered on landscape/nature. Historically Icelandic painting has long used landscape as a point of departure; landscape/nature also provides the painter with a “realistic” point of reference.
Sigurdsson´s landscapes have evolved from mountain views, an archetypal subject matter in Icelandic art, to the landscaped parks of European art history. Romanticism hardly enters into Sigurdsson’s landscapes. The show none of the chaos of nature, designed, re-structured; showcase hedges, triangular trees, geometrically perfect fields, golf courses. His nature is symmetrical, the nature of religious harmony, a nature both unreal and artificial. Even the green colour, nature’s very own signature, permeating these landscape paintings, cannot be found in nature, but provides a reference to “the original paradisiacal state. For Paradise means garden.”
The surface of Sigurdsson’s paintings is at all times smooth and unmarked, with no brushstrokes in evidence. The oil colours serve the sole purpose of connecting the painter to the history of art.
Sigurdsson’s historical references also involve the concepts of abstraction-figuration. Why are the same shapes sometimes seen as abstract, and other times as figurative? For this painter, the difference lies in the shadows.
Thus his paintings of open fields are evenly squared like abstract-geometric paintings. Only the shadows snaking along the irrigation ditches and roads provide a reference to a concrete subject matter. The open field, representing nature/landscape, also accords perfectly with Sigurdsson’s artistic aims, since it mimics the pictorial plane in its flatness. By rearranging traditional perspective an tilting the painted field, eventually to place it flat on a wall, the subject matter may be said to correspond exactly to these essence of painting; in effect you have a painting in harmony with itself.
The three-dimensional models (“Ideas for Gardens”) which the artist works on concurrently with the paintings can also be seen as their logical extensions. Basically, the models, like the paintings, are about the play of shadows, the relationship of light and shadow. In the models the painter makes deception visible by creating an utterly “real” artificial world, complete with artificial lighting and artificial shadows which do not withstand rational scrutiny (no more than the restructured nature that we find in the paintings).
*(All direct quotations are taken from an interview with the artist by the autor.)
Audur Olafsdottir, 1999.
(Art historian at the University of Iceland?)