STAKES

For Haraldur Jónsson, art is a challenge often dependent on chance, which he constantly renews, thwarting conventions. He transgresses the line between art and life, and could adopt Robert Filliou’s famous phrase, “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” One need only look at TSOYL’s “The Story of Your Life” or his Instagram page, haralsdur8525,  to appreciate this. By questioning everyday life through videos and photos, Haraldur shifts boundaries, encourages reflection, and prompts the “viewer” to question themselves.

At times, he operates through very simple gestures—a tiny shift, a small addition, or a slight subtraction. He uses a wide variety of media; sculptures, ceramics, drawings, photographs, video, sound installations, and all sorts of materials, both tangible—clay, rubber, glass, and paper—and immaterial—language and light. He plays with the outside and the inside, whether it’s a building or the human body, which he also explores from the inside.

For example, in the piece “Gate/Gátt” he pricked his index finger with an aseptic pin in a paint store. He let a drop of blood drip onto blotting paper, which he had scanned by the store’s computer system to obtain a blood-colored paint, which he used to create the work on the bedroom wall. The height of the work is identical to that of the entrance door to the bedroom. Blood—a source of both life and death—has given rise to countless beliefs, sacrifices, and superstitions. But its red color is also synonymous with light and warmth, like the sun to which it is related, as well as in ancient societies where red is the color of life.

And it is precisely life, perception, emotion, sensation, the body, and language that are at the center of Haraldur’s work, as he always constructs, or reconstructs, his projects according to spaces. Passionate about words, he writes poems and publishes books. This passion has nourished his work from the very beginning. He says he perceives language as a space, a climate. He loves the interaction and complexity he perceives between language and perception. He is also interested in language learning, accents, and pronunciation, speaking several languages ​​himself. In 1996, he created two sculptures based on the shape of Icelandic letters, Fontur Þ and Fontur Ð.

That same year, he exhibited for the first time the piece Íslenskt málver / Icelandic Language Laboratory, composed of 12 photographs showing immigrants wearing headphones in a classroom learning to pronounce Icelandic. Avidly fond of polysemous words, he readily uses them in the titles of his exhibitions as well as his works, such as Langue/Tunga and Prey/Bráð. The word Tunga (tongue) has a double meaning in Icelandic as it does in English, and the word Bráð can mean prey, something melted, or that something will not change anytime soon. Some of Haraldur’s sound installations also reflect his interest in language and silence, such as the piece Compte/Talning, in which we hear a child who has just learned to count to one hundred.

When it came to inviting Haraldur to exhibit at Appart_323, I tried to recall when we first met. Was it in the deserted center of Iceland when we were both tour guides? Was it in Paris during his studies at the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques (1991-92)? I don’t remember. However, I clearly remember his liveliness, his curiosity, and his openness to others, his intense, questioning, mischievous gaze, and the pertinent questions he would throw at his interlocutor to provoke a reaction, as if he wanted to create confusion while seeking complicity. As if his thinking were simultaneously that of a sentimentalist and that of an analyst wary of feelings. And that is exactly what he does with his art, always searching, questioning, in a quest for balance between the conscious and the unconscious or between heaven and earth.

Haraldur’s approach is akin to that of Yves Klein, who appropriated the sky, saying that “the blue sky was his first work of art.” Both worked with invisible and immaterial ideas-materials such as silence, darkness, sounds and tactile sensations. But Haraldur did not come from Iceland to Paris to jump into the Void like Yves Klein in Fontenay-aux-Roses in 1960. He came with thousands of small rounds of black confetti in his suitcase to darken the city of lights for a few seconds. A performance that may recall the acid ash rain that fell on France and other countries during the eruption of Lakagígar in Iceland in 1783-1784, which had dramatic consequences, resulting in climate change for several years, causing disastrous harvests and famines, and which some historians believe to be the cause of the French Revolution.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Haraldur is publishing a limited edition signed edition of the book ENJEUX, an independent work that accompanies the exhibition.

Laufey Helgadóttir