Ragnar Þórisson. Untitled, 2013; oil on canvas; 200 x 170 cm. Courtesy of Reykjavík Art Museum.

Ragnar’s work exhibits a clear influence from Expressionist artists while presenting something fresh and unique. The terror and anxiety present in certain iconic Expressionist works is mostly absent, but an aura of uncertainty persists. The hard lines of Egon Schiele and Erich Heckel are apparent, which at times also seems to be a nod toward printmaking. Many of Ragnar’s works, however, diverge from the relatively realistic subject matter of the Expressionists, approaching something that resembles folklore. Though anthropomorphic, the subjects in many paintings don’t seem fully human. The artist employs thin layers of paint to expose underdrawings, with only partial background areas blocked in. His paintings appear intentionally unfinished, resulting in an ambiguous psychological feeling.

The most striking painting (all works are untitled) is large enough to occupy an entire wall, and features an outdoor setting, unlike most of the other works, and a more colorful and varied palette. A single, robed figure stands in a forest, flanked by tall trees with persimmon-colored trunks. This work contains more detail than others, allowing viewers to establish a setting, but not enough detail to establish context. The gender—and even the species—of the figure is unclear, though they stand with a slight hunch. It’s unclear whether this individual reigns over this woodland sanctum, or if they are in a vulnerable state. The sober tones, and the centrality of the figure within the frame, create an atmosphere of importance—this is not a leisurely Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte—but the uncertainty persists, and the inability to settle on one of several opposing readings is unsettling.

Ragnar Þórisson. Untitled, 2017; oil on canvas; 200 x 170 cm. Courtesy of Reykjavík Art Museum.

Another painting depicts two amorphous figures who stand under a black sky. Their bodies, shrouded in gray-blue, are painted with a combination of both thick and thin layers of the same black ether that floats above them, but their faces are a deathly white. Both figures look toward the ground a distance in front of them and, though their mouths are barely painted on, their somberness is undeniable. The figures’ humanity is a little more apparent than the forest-wanderer, even though their forms are abstract in comparison. This work appears as both an allegory for death, and an earnest and poetic depiction of a life of mourning. Whether these figures are living or dead is an open question.

Ragnar Þórisson. Untitled, 2014; oil on canvas; 35 x 28 cm. Courtesy of Reykjavík Art Museum.

Other paintings more clearly depict human figures, such as several with men posing in formal attire. These works are the most straightforward in the exhibition, but they are still far from unambiguous. One painting is bare almost to the point of being a study. The man’s coat is nearly the identical drab color of the background, and his face is only a tad paler. His downcast, forlorn look resembles the two ghostly creatures from the other work, but with more detailed composition, including discernible lips, a nose, and cheekbones.

Ragnar Þórisson. Untitled, 2016; oil on canvas; 200 x 140 cm. Courtesy of Reykjavík Art Museum.

Works like this one—or another of an elliptically shaped man with the same straight long hair and receding hairline—provide a visual contrast to those that are more mythical. But they also act as a bridge between personal experience and allegory. The inclusion of these disparate works in the same body, titled Human Disguises nonetheless, indicates similarities between lived reality and how it can be represented or perceived in its extremes. These works translate a spectrum of human experiences, from mundane melancholy to those that cause us to question our own reality. With this reading, however, one painting begs the most questions. In it, a creature with a body like a grand piano and a head resembling a vulture skull glares nightmarishly at the viewer. I am left wondering what human experience this is a disguise for.

D30 Ragnar Þórisson: Human Disguise is on view through May 7, 2017.

As the youngest artist ever to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale, Kjartansson penetrated the art world’s collective consciousness with The End–Venice in 2009. This performance piece, like so much of his subsequent work, managed to be at once playful and provocative, sly and guileless. Ensconcing himself with friend and fellow artist Pall Haukur Bjornsson in a Venetian palazzo for the Biennale’s six-month run, he proceeded to churn out one painting per day, each depicting the variously posed yet invariably Speedo-clad Bjornsson.

The resulting œuvre—144 canvases in total—alluded to diverse artistic periods and riffed on numerous painterly styles. Overtly bound to the ephemeral, irretrievable conditions of their making, the canvases made explicit the duality of temporal independence and historical specificity implicit in the material work of art. Ultimately, the works inhabited an uncertain state between autonomy and implication, and despite their elemental, antic energy, they evinced a certain lack—the viewer, knowing the paintings’ role within a larger artistic project, could scarcely help but see them as material fragments of an unreproducible whole.

The End—Venice refracted the ebb and flow—backward, forward, side-to-side—of contemporary art itself; it effectively “performed” the conditions of uncertainty, ambivalence, and contingency that inform so much art making and viewing today. The End also elucidated a particular approach to the creative act that has distinguished Kjartansson’s practice, an approach that has its roots in Icelandic history and culture. As Kjartansson has explained, “You drive through the [Icelandic] landscape, and every hill, every farm, has a story connected to it. That’s how my performance works are. I don’t believe in the idea that you have to obtain the art piece to have it—or even see the art piece. It exists as a story.”[1]

Which brings us to the artist’s recent video The Man (2010), a centerpiece of the current exhibition Ragnar Kjartansson: Song at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The notion of story, and a profound attunement to the mysteries of place and time, resonates with especial force in this work; in fact, the video further illuminates those cross-currents of past and present, individual and social, aesthetic and experiential that inform the artist’s ever-evolving body of work.

A musician as well as a visual artist, and one who studied painting before turning his attention to performance, Kjartansson infuses his multi-media works with a vitality that is visual and aural, textural and rhythmic. In The Man, music and performance, time and history, are ambiguously interwoven as the artist cedes the stage to the late bluesman Pinetop Perkins. Framing the then-ninety-six-year-old Perkins against an evocatively rural backdrop—one that immediately calls to mind a Wyeth landscape—Kjartansson observes his subject with a clear-eyed calm that is resolutely unsentimental yet profoundly humanizing.

Interestingly, the naturalness of the artist’s staging is such that the viewer only retrospectively registers the scene’s essential anachronisms: an upright piano and a microphone found standing in an overgrown field; the bluesman’s slow-moving yet determined entrance on the grassy “stage,” whose austere backdrop is an abandoned farmhouse and several overhead electrical wires. Artifice and authenticity, choreography and happenstance, seem to collapse into one another in ways that seem effortless. The result is a kind of experiential interlude, a deeply personal, utterly compelling encounter with a singular man in an ephemeral moment.

The idiosyncrasies that underlie and emerge throughout The Man reiterate and affirm Kjartansson’s attunement to the omnipresence of history and the “stories” that permeate our collective consciousness. In the video, the hollowed-out, mysterious aura of the farmhouse silently collides with the frail yet animated presence of the elderly musician; similarly, the gaping desolation suggested by the house’s glassless, darkened windows is shattered by the bluesman’s lively stream-of-consciousness rhythms and commentary.

In presenting us with Perkins, an irrepressible figure whose very presence is history incarnate, Kjartansson quietly confronts us with time’s unsentimental, even ruthless, forward march, and with our own essential entanglement in a web of shared history, individual experience, and cultural memory. Wearing profundity like a blithely tossed-on overcoat, the artist leads us, finally, into unexpectedly provocative depths.

Monika Fryčová, Perpetuum Mobile, 2011. Image: Kling og Bang gallery.

Monika Fryčová’s show Perpetuum Mobile at the Kling og Bang Gallery propositions that the relationship between the visible and invisible is constantly in motion and ephemeral.

Locked behind the socialist borders in then-Czechoslovakia, stories of local culture were the only narratives that Fryčová heard. Like many artists who were restless for new physical activity and renewed visions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Fryčová became in her own words, a traveller who charted her own routes and made her own narratives without maps or guides. Consequentially, Fryčová’s works are highly improvised, and dependent on the indeterminacy and spontaneity of human interactions.

Monika Fryčová, Monika & Trabi in train station, Prostejov, 2005. Image: Monikafryčová.net

A red automobile-turned-limousine was an early, physical manifestation of Fryčová’s desire for mobility, which she drove to school in 2005 and finally made it to Berlin some years later where she was arrested by the traffic police for the car’s non-regulated standards. Intended as “moving sculpture” and created for the purpose of performance, the red Trabi is Fryčová’s assertion of artistic and political freedom beyond the spectre of the Iron Curtain, but also the artistic vindication of the dynamic flux and non-linear processes that characterise aspects of human nature.

Monika Fryčová, Open Springs no. 2, 2009, ongoing project. Image: Monikafryčová.net

Having investigated the artistic gestures that were given freer reign after a period of enforced socio-political isolation, her research now speculates upon the less charted regions of human existence: principles of chaos, intuition, perceptions and mythology. At the Kling og Bang Gallery, Fryčová’s framed photographs of herself shot in various positions and in diverse locations are perched on a peculiar machine acting like a turnstile that expends energy into rotating endlessly. Perpetually in motion, her static photographs disallow the viewer any prolonged contemplation; instead, we are forced into forming fleeting impressions of ambivalent spaces where specifics are really inconsequential. As long as Fryčová’s works situated themselves in that strange gap between motion and stillness – with a distorted sense of space and time embedded within -,  any attempt at linearity or continuity can only remain illusory.

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Monika Fryčová was born in Prostejov, Czech Republic. She lives and works in both the Czech Republic and Iceland. Perpetuum Mobile runs until 18th December at the Kling og Bang Gallery in Reykjavik.