Ragnar Kjartansson

Ragnar Kjartansson (born 1976 in Reykjavik) is an exceptional figure on the international art scene. The artist applies a broad range of media - he paints, draws, plays the guitar, sings, constructs installations or video installations. The key to all of Kjartansson's art is its performative character: the physical presence and the artist's engagement in actions which are sometimes continued for hours, even weeks, but which are continuously highly emotionally charged. Some of the actions are "live", in the presence of an audience. Others are performed in front of the camera. In terms of their structure, the works refer to the classical pieces from the heroic times of performance art. Just like the performers from the 1970's, Kjartansson too often takes his actions to the limits of his own physical capacity and endurance, though in his case the work is not in any way drastic - instead of exposing the viewers to violent and traumatic experiments on the performer's body, the audience is enthralled, seduced and convinced. To put it bluntly, the artist does not cut his wrists open on the stage but. sings until he's breathless, thus provoking a similarly high level of tension among the viewers.

The specificity of Kjartansson's art can be easily associated with the Nordic cultural tradition. The artist would thus be something of a contemporary embodiment of the northern melancholy, a Viking troubadour exalting the beauty and ominousness of existence. But in his art Ragnar refers to a much broader spectrum of references: he is just as credible when singing Schuman as he is when performing country western repertoire; he is just as at ease with classical music forms as he is with clichés of modern pop culture. The one thing, however, which remains constant in all his art, is the strong romantic element, the inclination to play with extreme emotions: pathos and humour, sadness and happiness, horror and beauty, love and hate. Ragnar's esthetic exaltations are, therefore, also close to the Polish Romantic tradition filled with a touch of existentialism and the courageous belief in art as a force which can transform the world - or at least make our sad fate somewhat more beautiful. As any classical Romantic hero should, Ragnar blurs the boundaries between art and life, between a public performance and a natural way of life, between his own life and the lives of his protagonists.

A number of Kjartnasson's works draw their dynamism from references to pairs of protagonists bearing a dramaturgical potential, e.g. artist and model, singer and pianist, mother and son. The artist gives their relations a dramatic, an almost theatrical character. The two projects presented at the exhibition in Raster belong to this trend in Kjartnasson's work.   "God" (2007) is a monumental video installation which is a half-hour footage of the artist's performance with an accompanying big band. Throughout the entire piece Ragnar is continuously singing a single verse: sorrow conquers happiness. The movingly melancholic repetition of words in the stylized décor brings to mind a live reconstruction of a simple "repeat" function typical of any electronic equipment. The artist thus symbolically restores what art has lost in the era of mechanical reproduction. The simple gesture of repetition, however, also amplifies the existential tension of the scene stretched in time. The impression is that of a freeze-frame from an old film, played over and over again, at different paces and with changing pitches, until the passage of time - be it the historical or the immediate, human time - is no longer felt.

"Me and My Mother" (2000/2005/2010) is a performance played in front and for the camera. Here, that artist seems to reverse the traditional model of a mother-son relationship: Ragnar's mother spits in her child's face, however the action, radical in its expression, becomes absurd when repeated frequently during each of the three performances made thus far (in five-year intervals, in the same form, planned to go on until the death of one of the characters). As it is built on opposite gestures and, in effect, not devoid of humour, the action becomes a perverse expression of the invincible feeling of tenderness between a mother and a son.

Ragnar Kjartansson