Earth Was Found Nowhere preview by Páll Sólnes

earth was found nowhere

PAINTINGS BY PÁLL SÓLNES

THE CHEMISTRY OF PAINTING BY GUÐMUNDUR ODDUR MAGNÚSSON PROFESSOR AT THE ICELANDIC ACADEMY OF THE ARTS

n my mind the art of painting is nothing but an alchemical process – the magic of infusing matter with spirit and heart and that part has to be true in order to be beautiful. If you can’t paint from the heart you can’t paint at all. If you are not driven by the inner light – the vision of unborn reality – you are not really creative. That was the core of the romantic movement of the 19th century and that is also a timeless understanding of creativity. This innate, but so often suppressed, intuition which dares the soul to go beyond what the eyes can see. In my mind that is what Caspar David Friedrich, the icon of 19th century romanticism, meant: “The pure, frank sentiments we hold in our hearts are the only truthful sources of art. A painting which does not take its inspiration from the heart is nothing more than futile juggling.” This is exactly the way Páll Sólnes paints and he has always painted with emotional intensity. The core in Sólnes’ paintings is the light, often bursting into flames from a point in between the sky and earth materials. He observes landscape intensely, and his acute visual observations of form, space and colour in nature are part of the visual memories he draws upon while painting. What one colour does to another and what they do to each other in terms of space and interaction. The earth in the paintings is represented by dark umbra pigments, burned and raw and the sky is depicted with King’s blue light, cobalt blue, French ultramarine, intense turquoise or turquoise blue. A single dash of a bright colour found nowhere else in the painting seems to anchor and create equilibrium in the whole composition, most often based on permanent carmine, Indian yellow or perhaps permanent yellow deep on the top. But his way of expressing himself is more complex than mere romanticism. He can easily be classified as an abstract expressionist for at least two

reasons. One is about spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity and the other is about spirituality. Abstract art clearly implies the expression of ideas concerning the spiritual, the unconscious and the mind. Although the term “abstract expressionism” was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Stürm regarding German expressionism. In the United States, Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 in relation to the works of Wassily Kandinsky. This should remind us that all the main pioneers of abstract art, Piet Mondrian and Kashmir Malewitch, were deep into theosophy. The source of their fundamental creativity is spiritualism. The spirit of our times, at the turn of a new century, have so far not been so much about something fundamentally creative or “new”. They have been creative for sure, but in a different way. They have been about manipulating existing forms and ideas. Putting them into new contexts or seeing them from new or different points of view, stating that ideas are not in reality original – it is just the way we process them, execute them, perform them that makes the artwork original and, at the same time, personal or not. We have in many ways dematerialized the art object. Even by stating that painting is dead! Once this question was asked in art school and the wise old teacher scratched his head. “Dead? How can it be dead? Painting is just a medium like video–art or installations. It does not matter what kind of medium you use – IF, you are expressing something of a true nature. “If you can’t paint from the heart – you can’t paint at all” also means if you can’t PLAY from the heart you can’t play at all! You put the emphasis on the spontaneous, the automatic forces. We can, of course, trash all these classifications and categorizations of 19th century romanticism, abstract ex-

pressionism etc… Yesterday is like another country – the borders are now closed. Emptiness, white canvases, tabula rasa, nothingness, “earth was found nowhere nor the heavens above”. An opportunity for creation, here and now. An imaginary line is drawn, often slightly tilted, representing a horizon that reflects heaven and earth, between the vertical boarders of two-dimensional space, harmonies of blue notes, from the light tones of king’s blue, deep rich blue in the background and colours of earth in the foreground. In the mid-ground a focus is on the glowing splash of permanent carmine red with a tad of yellow or white. You look into the light and a new life is born. Thus is the nature of improvisation. “The key to creativity is a bad memory,” Miles Davis once said, which reminds us of the forces of improvisation. But behind all geniuses, like Miles, are tens of thousands of often painstaking hours. Páll Sólnes was born in northern Iceland during the fifties of the last century. We come from the same neighbourhood and have known each other since we were teenagers. Looking directly towards the east from the tower chamber of Páll Sólnes’ childhood house in his native town you see a smooth mountain with rocky cliffs, not at the top, but in the middle part in the gaze towards the east. That line of gaze is hypnotic and Sólnes once painted that sight for me in warm and hot colours. This line also marks the sunrise. Even then Páll was obsessed with the sun and, at his first exhibition in the early seventies in the cellar of our college, he put up an ink drawing with the title – “The rise of the sun seen from the point of view of the sun itself” – with shadows falling away from you. The world inside you is reflected by the world outside you. Páll Sólnes works now in the flatlands of southern Sweden, in solitude, far away from his subject and paints only what he sees within him.

THE COLOURS OF THE LANDSCAPE AND THE LANDSCAPE OF COLOURS BY ERIK RYNELL DOCTOR, SENIOR LECTURER, LUND UNIVERSITY

t is easy to see Páll Sólnes’ pictures as landscapes. A landscape is not just a matter of geography, nor is it necessarily a specific place. It can also be an inner world and the traces of previous impressions. Colour has a life of its own and the ability to bring things to life, its own creative power that causes new connections to arise. The relationship between the colour and the landscape in Páll Sólnes’ works is not a depictive one. Rather, he occupies the border between the landscape and the spatial possibilities that arise out of the colours’ own dynamics. We can also see his paint-

ings as compositions in colour, interspersed with associations with nature and the landscape. We sense the presence of skies, water, hills, fields and vegetation, but the pictures never cross the line to actually depicting anything specific. Páll comes from Akureyri in northern Iceland. The town lies on a fjord between mountains. The gaze reaches far into the distance and the gazer is surrounded by a landscape in constant transformation. At first sight, the long narrow Mount Vaðlaheiði on the other side of Eyjafjörður has quite a uniform colour scale, brown and grass green. The sky and the water in the fjord add

LANDSKAPENS FÄRGER OCH FÄRGERNAS LANDSKAP AV ERIK RYNELL DOKTOR, LEKTOR, LUNDS UNIVERSITET

et är lätt att uppfatta Páll Sólnes’ bilder som landskap. Ett landskap har inte bara med geografi att göra, det är inte nödvändigt en viss plats utan kan också vara inre världar och spår av intryck. Färgen har ett eget liv och förmåga att väcka till liv, en egen skapande kraft som får nya sammanhang att uppstå. Färgens förhållande till landskapet hos Páll Sólnes är inte avbildande. Snarare rör han sig vid gränsen mellan landskapet och de rumsliga möjligheter som uppstår ur färgernas egen dynamik. Man kan också se hans

målningar som kompositioner i färg med inströdda associationer till natur och landskap. Vi anar himlar, vatten, kullar, fält och vegetation, men bilderna kommer aldrig över gränsen att verkligen avbilda något bestämt. Páll kommer från Akureyri på Islands nordland. Staden ligger vid en vid fjord mellan bergen. Blicken når långt och man omges av ett lanskap i ständig förändring. Vid första anblicken har det långsträckta berget Vadlaheidi på andra sidan Eyafjördur en ganska enhetlig färgskala i brunt och gräsgrönt.

shades of blue in clear weather. Cloud shadows move over the hillsides. Towards evening, the colours grow darker and the light hollows out vertical incisions in the mountainsides. When evening light fills the fjord, the sky can be transformed into a sea of golden yellow, which then turns to red and is reflected in the water. But the Icelandic light also has a clarity that means that any object at all, the painted wall of a house, some flowers in a garden, can light up with a sudden presence, as if the colours emerge as we are looking at them. The unpredictability of the Icelandic landscape also applies to its colours.

Himlen och vattnet i fjorden tillför nyanser av blått vid klart väder. Molnskuggor drar över sluttningarna. Mot kvällen djupnar färgerna och ljuset gröper fram vertikala skåror utmed bergssidan. När kvällsljuset fyller fjorden kan himlen förvandlas till ett gyllengult hav som övergår i rött och reflekteras i fjordens vatten. Men det isländska ljuset har också en klarhet som gör att vilket föremål som helst, en målad husvägg, några blommor i en trädgård, kan lysa upp med en plötslig närvaro som om färgerna blir till medan man ser på. Det oförutsägbara i det isländska landskapet gäller även dess färger. Det är det storslagna och dramatiskt landskapets färger som man också kan se i det isländska måleriet. Denna intensitet kan glimta till i Páll Sólnes’ bilder. Men de himlar man tycker sig skönja skulle likaväl kunna vara de över fälten utanför Bollerup

t the dawn of ages there was nothing, was neither sand nor sea nor cool waves earth was found nowhere nor the heavens above, only the great void and nowhere grass

The Prophecy, from the Edda (Völuspá, Eddukvæði)

The sun shed from the south, the moon’s companion, with it’s right hand over the rim of the sky. The sun did not know where to seek repose, the stars did not know where they could rest, the moon did not know what might it had.

01 UNTITLED (EARTH WAS FOUND NOWHERE I). OIL ON CANVAS 125 X 145 CM

24 UNTITLED. OIL ON CANVAS 50 X 60 CM

25 UNTITLED. OIL ON CANVAS 125 X 145 CM

28 UNTITLED. OIL ON CANVAS 125 X 145 CM

29 OIL, PENCIL AND CRYON ON PAPER 70 X 100 CM

30 OIL, PENCIL AND CRYON ON PAPER 70 X 100 CM

56 BRÚNI II. OIL ON CANVAS 140 X 170 CM

57 BRÚNI II. OIL ON CANVAS 140 X 170 CM

PÁLL SÓLNES Born in Akureyri, Iceland 1953. TRAINING The Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Design 1978–82 Studies of classic drawing at New Carlsberg Glyptotek 1974–76 Studies of Litterature at The University of Copenhagen 1974–78 EXHIBITIONS Galleri Sandberg, Copenhagen, Denmark 1980 Galleri for nutidskunst, Copenhagen, Denmark 1982 Icelandic House of Culture, Copenhagen, Denmark 1986 Café Wilder, Copenhagen, Denmark 1987 Slunkaríki, Ísafjördur, Iceland 1990 Ketilhus, Akureyri, Iceland 1995 Bakkehuset, Humlebæk, Denmark 1998 Ketilhus, Akureyri, Iceland 1999 Villa Bournonville, Fredensborg, Denmark 1999 Galleri Eet skridt ned, Copenhagen, Denmark 2000 Akureyri Art Museum, Iceland 2002 Christinehof Slott, Sweden 2002 House of Culture, Borgå, Finland 2003 Sundsberggård, Sunne, Sweden 2003 Sjöbo Konsthall, Sweden 2004 Banegården, Aabenraa, Denmark 2005 Raschs Pakhus, Bornholm, Denmark 2005 Galleri Max, Ystad, Sweden 2006 Galleri Syrpa. Hafnarfjordur, Iceland 2008 Stadtmuseum Bergen, Rügen, Germany 2012 Galleri Max, Ystad, Sweden 2013 WORKS NIB, Nordiska Investeringbanken The Danish Ministry of the Environment EFTA, The European Free Trade Association Sjöbo Municipality, Sweden

earth was found nowhere

PAINTINGS BY PÁLL SÓLNES

“The core in Sólnes paintings is the light, often bursting into flames from a point inbetween the sky and earth materials. He observes landscape intensely, and his acute visual observations of form, space and color in nature are part of his visual memories he draws upon while painting. What one color does to another and what they do to each other in terms of space and interaction.”