Dr. theol. Gunnar Kristjánsson, Iceland
I want to present to you the works of two of the outstanding artists in
Iceland today. One belongs to the younger generation, the other to a slightly older generation.
The first one could be taken as representative of the artist who shows a tendency towards nature mysticism in his paintings, whereas the other shows a tendency to deposit the mysticism of suffering.
I´ll not go into definitions of the terms I have just used, nature mysticism and mysticism of suffering; instead I want you to see for yourselves how the two artists deal with these classic religious themes.
I. The divine presence within nature: Georg Guðni.
Recently I visited the artist Georg Guðni in his home in Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, where he lives with his family and he has his atelier.
When I called him some monhts ago and mentioned my interest in writing about his paintings, he was immediately interested and willing to discuss his works with me.
Georg Guðni is an artist in his thirties, born in 1961, who has developed a very personal style. He could be described as a follower of the artists of the first half of the century in Iceland, who were occupied with landscape painting; some could even find a relationship with the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich; (as a matter of fact I saw a big book on the works of Friedrich in Guðni´s atelier). But his paintings are

special and very personal, as I said. But why and how?
Religious themes are not common in Icelandic paintings, they are a definite exception in Icelandic painting in this century, therefore I was interested in asking Georg Guðni where his interest comes from. He mentioned his childhood; his father was a geologist and took his family with him during the summer into the Icelandic mountains and hills where they stayed for weeks and months. Georg Guðni loves the solitude and mystical atmosphere of the beautiful but at the same time lonely landscape. Later he himself worked during the summer in the highlands, and now he travels a lot in the highlands in his mountain jeep. There he gets his impressions and he paints during the winter.
The first thought that came to him, in this respect, was the line that divides heaven and earth or as he put it: the line that links heaven and earth. This line can be horizontal when it is formed at the horizon, or vertical when it is formed along steep cliffs, or diagonal where the slope leads down to the flat land. Georg Guðni´s earliest paintings were derived from this idea.
Myndir 1-2
I said that paintings with religious themes are not common in Icelandic art today, but neither is landscape painting. It was until the middle of this century, but not any more. In both respects Georg Guðni went his own way. And in both respects it is useless to look for religious symbols or
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allusions to the christian church. The essence of the works is a feeling that nature is a place of divine mystery. Whether the works are painted in bright colours or dark, it is easy to perceive strong light underneath, and the content draws the spectator far away, he may be led along a river in a valley, wanting to find out where its source is. His mind is led to the beginning.
Myndir 3-5
It takes the artist a long time to paint each of his paintings, he paints around eight of them a year. “The whole scene appears to be dissolved in a mist. There is an overall continuity in form and colour throughout the picture plane. Each image is in a dominant key, so to speak, a certain colour such as yellow, green or blue, that is continuously graduated both in brightness, i.e. from darkness to light, and in hue, e.g. from blue to green, or from brown through yellow to green. The oils are applied in transparent glazes, in vertical and horizontal bands that form an intricate gossamer web.”
Intertwining vertical and horizontal brushstrokes play a crucial role, since they create the binding structure yoking those oppositions, the sky and the earth, together. The result is strata of translucent and superimposed grids, piled one on top of each other in a series of extremely delicate glazes. At the same time, because of the heavy gloss resulting from the quantities of varnish the artist uses, the paintings seem
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to undergo a transformation in the surface layer and to be projected into the external space of the beholder, who is reflected in them and thus becomes an integral part of the work itself. The artist has succeeded in creating an impression of tremendous depth.
The effects the artist is trying to produce in his works are - to my understanding - religious ones. The artist experiences nature in religious way. This interpretation is not based on theories about religion or mysticism. The artist tries to avoid all learned theories about religion and mysticism, he relies completely on his own experience.
In our conversation he told me that he wants to express not a specific mountain or a certain area, but nature as a symbol, as a place where heaven and earth meet each other. The more you look, the closer you get to a place where there is no motion, nothing but absolute stillness: “The still point of the turning world,” as T.S. Eliot put it. In our discussion Georg Guðni often mentioned the word eternity.
His perception of the landscape, of its luminous depth, is the feeling for a “presence of an atmosphere [that] is hardly recognised, and the thin, white, bodiless light of the morning comes to the peaks and glaciers as a pure spiritual essence, the most impressive of all the terrestial manifestations of God... everything is full of hazy shadows, graduating into an open, silvery field of light, and lofty headlands with fine arching insteps dipping their feet in the shining water” to use the
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words of John Muir written more than a century ago.
Myndir 6-9
The first time I saw the work of Georg Guðni, I recognised a certain feeling of my own that I had experienced on my travels in the waste areas of the interior of Iceland, especially weeklong horseback-riding tours in the country. It is a feeling for a divine presence. It is not that creation is God´s picture book and that through the beauty of nature we can experience God. Rather it is a sense of his Presence in the quietness, in the solitude, in the light, in the feeling for distance, in the feeling for eternity. Therefore the paintings of Georg Guðni signify a divine
Presence in nature. And he does this with great integrity.
The land is a place where heaven and earth meet. But it is more.
It is a place where man experiences his alienation from beauty itself. In the solitude of nature he realizes that he is away from home, his yearning is awakened, and his longing for God becomes a strong feeling, he experiences a divine presence.
II. Mysticism of suffering: Magnús Kjartansson
The other artist I want to present to you this morning is Magnús
Kjartansson. I have slides of nine paintings that he showed in an exhibition in Reykjavík three years ago, and after that in Barcelona in
Spain.
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Magnús Kjartansson was born in Iceland in 1949. He studied painting in Iceland and Denmark and early showed great talent. He was very inventive, taking part in the movement of conceptual art in Iceland.
Magnús Kjartansson has participated in two exhibitions I organised along with my friends among artists and theologians, but he didn´t show works in the exhibitions themselves. Maybe he was afraid of being marked as a religious painter, I don´t know. He was very active in the dialogue.
His exhibition got great attention, he showed a new side of himself; this time he showed paintings with religious themes only, all the paintings were quite large. The theme he was dealing with was suffering.
Magnús Kjartansson went his own way. The pictures do not use conventional religious symbols, but the titles indicate the artist´s intention. The material in all the paintings is oil, sawdust, and glue on canvas; in some of them sawdust and wood.
His works do not show the same tendency as those of Georg
Guðni; he is not aware of the divine presence in nature, but in suffering.
Here his works are well grounded in the Icelandic cultural tradition, where the place of suffering is overwhelming, as in many other northern, protestant countries.
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Now we turn to the paintings.
1. A Walk in the Night. 230 x 250 cm
The painting shows a big office building which the artist can see when he looks out of his window. The colour of the painting makes an allusion not only to the darkness but also to death. The person carrying the cross away from the building is a direct allusion to the suffering of Christ.
2. Resurrection.
180 by 180 cm
The foot with the marking of the nail is again a direct allusion to the sufferings of Christ; the upper half shows a bowl with blue water, a symbol of new life and new hope.
3. Memento The size is 180 by 180 cm
In the middle of the painting we see the title of it: Memento, I remember.
The hand before the eyes directs the thought inward, toward the memory, to the inside. What is there, what is there to remember?
4. The Annunciation. 180 by 360 cm
Oil, sawdust and glue on canvas,. A large painting; the brown mild colour and the face with the hands before direct the mind inward, toward the memory, we experience a contemplative atmosphere when we look at the painting.
The left face is completely closed, directed inward, the hand covers the eyes and the left eye is closed. On the right half we realize that something has happened, the colour is brighter, the hands are the
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same, but the left eye is open as if there is something to look at, above the eyes, in the middle of the face there is a flute.
5. Good Friday.
215 x 230 cm
Again the same building we saw before. The dark, lifeless, heavy colour makes an allusion to death. And the title gives us the thoughts of the artist, it is Good Friday. Good Friday as an office building which the artist can see out of the window of his living room is a rather unusual expression. You notice the Icelandic flag displayed at half mast, an
Icelandic custom on Good Friday.
Maybe it is a part of the strong impression this painting made on the people at the exhibition that the office building belonged to the
Cooperative Movement in Iceland which at that time, few years ago, was going bankrupt.
6. Venetian school III: Amor sacro e amor profano. 180 x 382 cm.
This is a view through a window in the center of Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland. To the right we can see the Parliament Building, to the left the front of the Reykjavík Cathedral, in the middle an office building.
Painted or carved in the middle is Amor sacro e amor profano or the love of the holy and the love of the secular.
7. Venetian school I: The Annunciation.
180 x 180 cm.
The Venetian school; this is the fourth picture, the Annunciation, occurring the second time. This time we see a detail of the first painting,
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the left half, with the closed eye. The Annunciation is a mystery, not to be perceived with open eyes; the focus is only on the hands and one closed eye. The hands of prayer and the closed eyes of meditation.
8. Altarpiece. 180 x 374 cm.
The colour is much the same as the colour of the painting Memento.
A man and a woman covering their faces with their hands, looking with one eye towards the lower center of the painting, toward the symbol of the cross. Looking at the cross is the theme of the painting, looking in meditation at the cross, the symbol of suffering which is at the same time the connection line to the transcendence. But why the title Altarpiece?
9. The Cooperative House.
225 x 350 cm.
The Icelandic title of this painting is Kirkjusandur which is the name of the office building and it means: The Church sand or the sand of the church, again the office building of the Cooperative movement.
As you notice, on the left of the painting are some people raising a cross. Once again a combination of the passion story and the everyday reality the artist can see out of his window. There is much to say about this painting but it is also possible to say nothing. This is the last painting in the cyclus about suffering. It is here and now, not only in
Jerusalem 2000 years ago, that there is suffering; Christ suffers or in other word: God suffers in the world.
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III. Conclusion
The artist Magnús Kjartansson is not to my knowledge a churchgoer, but he has found the way to express the mystery of some elements of the christian faith. The presence of Christ in the suffering of man is the main theme in the paintings. The second is the mystery of the annunciation, in other words the mystery of the closeness of God or the unexpected immediate nearness of God; suddenly he is there. And the third point is the element of hope tied to the resurrection of Christ. How are we to express a real hope, the hope that is the deepest mystery of being?
Through the resurrection, the artist seems to answer; the blue, fresh water which gives us the new strength to live a new life of hope in spite of suffering.
The other artist, Georg Guðni, is to the best of my knowlegde not a churchgoer either, but he has found his way to deal with religious themes; in his case it is the divine presence in the field of nature. The divine Presence is for him a mystery, it is not to be found in books or doctrine, not within the established church, not through knowing or understanding. It is to a great extent a negative way to God, it is the feeling for his presence in the field of nature. Nature is for this artist not dead matter, it is a place where God makes himself available to man in a mysterious presence.
Thank you.
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