P A I N T I N G S B Y P Á L L S Ó L N E S

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THE CHEMISTRY OF PAINTINGBY GUÐMUNDUR ODDUR MAGNÚSSON PROFESSOR AT THE ICELANDIC ACADEMY OF THE ARTS

In 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 cen-tury and that is also a timeless understanding of creativity. This innate, but so often suppressed, in-tuition 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 paint-ing 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 burst-ing into flames from a point in between the sky and earth materials. He observes landscape in-tensely, 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 ultrama-rine, 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 per-manent carmine, Indian yellow or perhaps perma-nent yellow deep on the top.

But his way of expressing himself is more com-plex than mere romanticism. He can easily be clas-sified as an abstract expressionist for at least two

reasons. One is about spontaneity or the impres-sion of spontaneity and the other is about spiri-tuality. Abstract art clearly implies the expression of ideas concerning the spiritual, the unconscious and the mind. Although the term “abstract expres-sionism” 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 Kandin-sky. This should remind us that all the main pio-neers 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 cen-tury, have so far not been so much about some-thing 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, stat-ing 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 catego-rizations of 19th century romanticism, abstract ex-

pressionism etc… Yesterday is like another country – the borders are now closed. Emptiness, white can-vases, 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 verti-cal 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 thou-sands of often painstaking hours. Páll Sólnes was born in northern Iceland during the fifties of the last century. We come from the same neighbour-hood 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 draw-ing with the title – “The rise of the sun seen from the point of view of the sun itself” – with shad-ows 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.

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It is easy to see Páll Sólnes’ pictures as land-scapes.

A landscape is not just a matter of geogra-phy, 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 pow-er that causes new connections to arise. The rela-tionship between the colour and the landscape in Páll Sólnes’ works is not a depictive one. Rath-er, 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 trans-formation. 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

shades of blue in clear weather. Cloud shadows move over the hillsides. Towards evening, the co-lours grow darker and the light hollows out verti-cal 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.

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

Det 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 landska-pet och de rumsliga möjligheter som uppstår ur färgernas egen dynamik. Man kan också se hans

målningar som kompositioner i färg med inströd-da 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. Blick-en når långt och man omges av ett lanskap i ständig förändring. Vid första anblicken har det långsträck-ta berget Vadlaheidi på andra sidan Eyafjördur en ganska enhetlig färgskala i brunt och gräsgrönt.

Himlen och vattnet i fjorden tillför nyanser av blått vid klart väder. Molnskuggor drar över slut-tningarna. 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 måler-iet. 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

LANDSKAPENS FÄRGER OCH FÄRGERNAS LANDSKAPAV ERIK RYNELL DOKTOR, LEKTOR, LUNDS UNIVERSITET

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A t t h e d a w n o f a g e st h e r e w a s n o t h i n g ,

w a s n e i t h e r s a n d n o r s e an o r c o o l w a v e se a r t h w a s f o u n d n o w h e r en o r t h e h e a v e n s a b o v e ,o n l y t h e g r e a t v o i d a n d n o w h e r e g r a s s

T h e s u n s h e d f r o m t h e s o u t h ,t h e m o o n ’ s c o m p a n i o n ,w i t h i t ’ s r i g h t h a n d o v e rt h e r i m o f t h e s k y .T h e s u n d i d n o t k n o ww h e r e t o s e e k r e p o s e ,t h e s t a r s d i d n o t k n o ww h e r e t h e y c o u l d r e s t ,t h e m o o n d i d n o t k n o w w h a t m i g h t i t h a d .

T h e P r o p h e c y , f r o m t h e E d d a ( V ö l u s p á , E d d u k v æ ð i )

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

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24 UNTITLED. OIL ON CANVAS 50 X 60 CM

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25 UNTITLED. OIL ON CANVAS 125 X 145 CM

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28 UNTITLED. OIL ON CANVAS 125 X 145 CM

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

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

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56 BRÚNI II. OIL ON CANVAS 140 X 170 CM

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57 BRÚNI II. OIL ON CANVAS 140 X 170 CM

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PÁLL SÓLNESBorn in Akureyri, Iceland 1953.

TRAININGThe Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Design 1978–82Studies of classic drawing at New Carlsberg Glyptotek 1974–76Studies of Litterature at The University of Copenhagen 1974–78

EXHIBITIONSGalleri Sandberg, Copenhagen, Denmark 1980Galleri for nutidskunst, Copenhagen, Denmark 1982Icelandic House of Culture, Copenhagen, Denmark 1986Café Wilder, Copenhagen, Denmark 1987Slunkaríki, Ísafjördur, Iceland 1990Ketilhus, Akureyri, Iceland 1995Bakkehuset, Humlebæk, Denmark 1998Ketilhus, Akureyri, Iceland 1999Villa Bournonville, Fredensborg, Denmark 1999Galleri Eet skridt ned, Copenhagen, Denmark 2000Akureyri Art Museum, Iceland 2002Christinehof Slott, Sweden 2002House of Culture, Borgå, Finland 2003Sundsberggård, Sunne, Sweden 2003Sjöbo Konsthall, Sweden 2004Banegården, Aabenraa, Denmark 2005Raschs Pakhus, Bornholm, Denmark 2005Galleri Max, Ystad, Sweden 2006Galleri Syrpa. Hafnarfjordur, Iceland 2008Stadtmuseum Bergen, Rügen, Germany 2012Galleri Max, Ystad, Sweden 2013

WORKSNIB, Nordiska InvesteringbankenThe Danish Ministry of the EnvironmentEFTA, The European Free Trade AssociationSjöbo Municipality, Sweden

“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 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.”

P A I N T I N G S B Y P Á L L S Ó L N E S

earth found nowhere

was