Ragnar Kjartansson: Mother and Child, Gin and Tonic
i8 Gallery is pleased to announce Mother and Child, Gin and Tonic, an exhibition of new paintings by Ragnar Kjartansson. This show, Kjartansson's fifth at i8, opens with a reception on Thursday, 22 February and will be on view until 4 May 2024.
Mediums are indelibly linked throughout Kjartansson's practice: paintings are performative, films are painterly, and performances are sculptural. In capturing scenes of working from his studio and home, Kjartansson continues his interest in exploring the spectacular and the nature of painting. Throughout these works, life appears still, but they resonate with the characters who are just out of view.
In 2009, Kjartansson represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale. For the entirety of the Biennale, Kjartansson transformed a palazzo into his studio, spending the days painting his friend, the artist Páll Haukur Björnsson, while drinking beer and smoking – riffing on the idea of a “macho painter” and fully embodying the cliché of an artist. Considering stereotypes of beauty, vulnerability, masculinity, and joy, Kjartansson’s storytelling resulted in a group of 144 paintings (one made each day) documenting the performance. In the following text, Björnsson, Kjartansson’s subject and collaborator in 2009, reflects on Kjartansson’s new paintings:
Myth/fantasy/tall tale
I figured one day I’d just wake up and find out what the hell yesterday was all about, says Nikki, played by Laura Dern in the film Inland Empire, before she kneels and throws up blood on the concrete sidewalk: a red dot at the end of a chaotic sentence belonging to one specific Western existence.[1] I’ve always thought that this scene, if one imagines it being replayed infinitely, is like a work by Ragnar, and now, as I stand before his new paintings, it comes to mind. Not because of the hyper-genuine/ironic existence that the scene has in common with Ragnar’s previous works but because of the absence of that (half)pitiful existence that often fuels it.
On the colourful surfaces of the new paintings, existence has been replaced by being, by apparent emptiness. Maybe because of the world and everything, I think. Despite that, the paintings are not empty; they contain a plethora of objects. Still, there is an absence that first catches the eye: the absence of the person, the one who exists, the one that vomits blood, reaps the disgust of their mother a thousand times over or grieves forever. Instead, from what it seems, we have the artist’s studio environment, familiar items and various tools, instruments, theatre backdrops and other items and props. These items could be recognised as the products of the aesthetic myth/fantasy/tall tale that constitutes the artist but here, the artist’s tools and environment, are stripped of their agency and reduced to a seemingly meaninglessly composed surfaces. It’s tempting to sit down and dwell precisely there, in the emptiness and silence, rejoicing in the meaninglessness, but the doubt caused by the persistent fluctuation between irony and sincerity that stems from the artist’s myth/fantasy/tall tale complicates the experience.
The threat of the meaningless (if one is afraid of such things) possibly comes from the contradiction, where being, or that natural element which art often tries to avoid belonging to, is so finite, whilst existence, or art, provides an aesthetic deathlessness far removed from natural endings. Hilmir Snær (Actor from Krieg, a 2016 theatre piece by Ragnar) takes the stage and dies indefinitely (metaphorically speaking). Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century German philosopher whose dualistic ghost still haunts us, made precisely that distinction between nature and art. He believed that natural phenomena had ends and followed a teleology with their definite purpose, while art and aesthetics are perceived to have a purposiveness without an end.[2] Art belongs to the subjective and touches us (ironically enough) disinterestedly when we engage in the pleasures of existence, an existence that Ragnar often touches on in his works. Somehow, Ragnar effectively positions this existence between the two opposite poles that Kant tries to delineate, muddling them and often drawing out the absurd in the ideological; Making it unscalable nonsense that echoes in our guilty nervous systems (as an example) to the point that we don’t perceive ourselves anymore as interpreters on the surface of the objects but an extension of the same surface. Just geometric and topological irrelevance on the surface of an object-ontology that goes about its business no matter what we think. Existentially, so to speak.
Myth/fantasy/tall tale and artist. Objects that in themselves have obscure meanings are perfectly significant within the ideological fantasy that is the artist. The French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes described the myth (fiction, fantasy, tale) in a contemporary context by addressing it as a semiotic system of signs whose causations are lost to us. I.e., the relation between sign and meaning, signifier and signified, the reason why something means something to us in the first place, has become obfuscated, mythic, and fixed in our cultural context – like notions of freedom, happiness or pop-music. Thus, we move being into existence and fuse it with Kant’s aesthetic infinite purposiveness without an end.
The myth, fantasy, tall tale, which is Ragnar, propels these paintings in a more obscure direction than their surfaces first might indicate. My attempts to separate the myth from a more immanent meaning, attempting to free the work from the perplexed existence of previous work proves impossible, reminding me of when Ragnar’s mother once whispered to me that it was needless to ruin a good story with the truth. Ragnar’s art is driven by existence (which in turn is motivated by its own internal myth-logic about humans and purpose and those sorts of things - indefinitely.)
In the light of this myth/fantasy/tall tale, the compositions on the surface of the paintings open and close interchangeably, sometimes threatening the bottomless spiral of guilt and despair and other times offering the serene meaninglessness of arranged still lives. The painted surfaces are opaque in their simplicity, like a puddle reflecting the sun, so we can’t see its bottom. They pin us down as we decide whether we fight or fly as we fluctuate between the myth/fantasy/tall tale of Western desperation and an object-oriented representation on a slow journey towards its teleological, natural ending.
Looking at a painting is to look at the world, inevitably, and I wonder whether it is on those terms that the human being has ultimately yielded to myth/fantasy/tall tale. Whether the true meaninglessness is derived from an existence faced with the fact that when all the ends that have been pursued appear arbitrary and useless … [c]onscious of being unable to be anything, man then decides to be nothing.[3]
[1] Inland Empire, David Lynch, 2006.
[2] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 1790.
[3] Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947.
Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976) lives and works in Reykjavík. Major solo shows include exhibitions at the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Reykjavík Art Museum; the Barbican Centre, London; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Park, Washington D.C.; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and De Pont Museum, Tilburg, among others. Kjartansson participated in The Encyclopedic Palace at the Venice Biennale in 2013, Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2014, and he represented Iceland at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The artist received the 2019 Ars Fennica Award and was the recipient of the 2015 Artes Mundi’s Derek Williams Trust Purchase Award, as well as Performa’s 2011 Malcolm McLaren Award. Kjaransson studied painting at the Iceland Academy of the Arts.
