Ragnar Kjartansson
The End
The Pavilion of Iceland
53rd la Biennale di Venezia
Welcome to the end, as posed by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson in the Palazzo Michiel dal Bruasà. The Baroque-style structure has been transformed into a studio for the six month run of the Venice Biennial. Kjartansson spends his days painting portraits of his friend, model, and fellow artist Pall Haukur Bjornsson, wearing the same Speedo each day, under the tender Venetian light. Throughout the duration of the Biennale beer bottles, cigarettes, and finished paintings will collectively pollute the space.
In contrast with his ongoing performance Kjartansson also presents The End; a five-projection video with audio component of him and another musician playing instruments in the vast Rocky Mountains landscape. Each of the five videos have separate audio portions which creates a single musical composition.
Kjartansson has created a plateau on the grandest stage, la Biennale, to perform obsessive aspirations and spectacle of a mentally tortured painter (think Italian painter Giorgio Morandi), against the secluded humble idea of the artist in hiding. In the pavilion while Ragnar is at work, in his paint stained clothing, there is a heightened sense of engagement and anticipation for his next move. As the tempo of militant symphony, Mahler, rises and hits a high note he calmly stands up and re-approaches the canvas with a smooth grey stroke. Kjartansson has cleverly fed in sounds of the Grand Canal crashing against the dock into the studio area. He is making sure the audience doesn't forget that they are experiencing him performing at such a unique and epic location.
Your blood-pressure lowers and you can forget you are even in Venice as you enter the video-installation. The cinematographic shots of the two musicians in the mountains entirely oppose the historically overloaded and claustrophobic experience of Venice and the Biennale. As a whole exhibition The End presents questions of what it's title is saying.
Is, with a post-apocalyptic global warming mentality, the beginning of the end the sinking of Venice while the mountains will be the last to fall under oceanic siege? Or is it the end of history as many post-structuralists and post-modernists have proposed? Or is he optimistically suggesting that the only way to Fare Mondi (make worlds) is to do what every young artist wants to do: sit, think, smoke, drink, and make art?
Thank you for the fantasy, Ragnar.
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