Type catches our eye and the letterforms lead it on along the line of text. We recognise text and read it wherever it may crop up. Despite the incessant bombardment of signage and printed matter we grasp the words and messages seep in, for better or for worse. But type is very different from the images which also work well in advertising. Typeset text invites reading and when we read the text opens up to and with it the whole culture and history from which it was born.

This is the key to why Jón Laxdal’s art is so engaging. Jón uses typeset text and its minions – the page, its margins and columns – but his art consists in a sort of interruption of our reading, a gentle deflection of the process that would lead us from text to understanding. The works are thus a kind of abstraction where the presentation and formal rules of typography are observed but the text itself fades into the background or is changed, along with its context, into something else. Semiotics have taught us how arduous the path is from text to language – how many layers separate the reader from the sense of the text – and Jón Laxdal inserts himself neatly into this process, touching off sparks of new understanding.

Jón Laxdal Halldórsson was born 1950 in Akureyri on Iceland’s northern coast, the country’s largest town away from the capital city of Reykjavík. All his life he has lived in the north, excepting three years when he went to the city to study in the newly-formed department of philosophy at the University of Iceland. While working on his own art and writing, Jón has contributed his efforts to building the cultural life of his home town. He participated in running the Red House in the 1980s, bringing new contemporary art to Akureyri, and he was active in establishing cultural life in the old industrial district in the town centre that now houses the Akureyri Art Museum in addition to several galleries, workshops and venues for performance. Jón even lived there until only last year.

Though Jón Laxdal has been working for more than twenty years and is well known in Akureyri, his name is familiar to only a few outside the district. Yet his art reflects approaches and concerns that are central to much of contemporary art and belongs in a international context. It is now time for Akureyri to share its enjoyment with the rest of the world. The very fact that so many museums and galleries have joined in the current exhibition project shows Jón’s strength and artistic status. The exhibition was developed in cooperation with Hafnarborg, the Hafnarfjörður Institute of culture and Fine Arts, which brings it to a major venue near the capital when the exhibition finishes in Akureyri. At the same time, Jón will also exhibit at Safn, a contemporary art venue in the city centre in Reykjavík. Next year, the exhibition will go to the Spielhaus Morrison Galerie in Berlin and then to the Faroe Islands Art Museum in the autumn of 2006.

Harvesting Words

On aspect of Jón Laxdal’s art is the collection and harvesting of raw material from stacks of old newspapers and sundry printed matter, his delicate relationship to yellowing newsprint, its typefaces, ornaments and organisational principles. This is an attractive aspect to many of us who still part only reluctantly with any printed matter and would secretly collect and hoard all the trivial flyers and handbills that come our way. These are the ephemera of print and as the name suggests they are never intended to survive the day. In old newspapers and pamphlets we can immerse ourselves in the daily life of a time gone by and old ideas and sensibilities come back to life as we handle such fragile mementoes. Such material in fact seems to show most clearly the spirit that infused daily life, often more so than the works that survive and thus become in some sense timeless. Examining Jón Laxdal’s works evoke similar thoughts, as though one were turning the leaves of an old scrapbook, a memory of some indistinct past. Here it is the paper itself and the texture of the old type that we are drawn to, as much as the form and textual content of the work.

This material has come to play an ever greater part in Jón’s work. At the very beginning he used mostly single letters or words which he carefully lifted from the original and rearranged on his pages. Gradually, more and more of the original material found its way into the work and he began to work with forms and arrangements drawn from the raw material itself, its columns and margins, frames and even images. He has even produced series of works made almost entirely from unprinted paper cut from the empty margins of old newspapers. The text, too, is given more room as Jón becomes surer in his approach and in his command of his chosen medium.

In collage works there is always a certain tension between the artist and material he uses. Found materials figure prominently in modern and contemporary art but anyone who uses it has to find a way to piece together the work of others to express an original idea of his own. Jón’s earliest works were along the lines of concrete poetry and the letters he cut out were perhaps primarily just convenient type for reuse. Jón also used transfer letters for a time. These early works appear in bursts or series where Jón explores new approaches to type and form, exhausting the possibilities of one idea before moving on to the next, turning out piece after piece. His approach becomes ever more focused and the choice of materials more precise. He selects his material – the letters, texts and images – not only on the basis of aesthetics. Rather they are the result of his long engagement with the originals and what they sought to communicate, an engagement that covers politics, philosophy, literature and gossip in one extended discussion.

Jon's Approach to Art

Anyone can cut out letters, texts and images and rearrange them. It is even quite easy to produce clever puns and seemingly significant juxtapositions using collage and assemblage but Jón’s art is born of long practice and rigorous investigation. He came to art in a roundabout way, through philosophy and poetry, in the 1970s when the “new art” came to Iceland and started to erode the boundaries between these pursuits. Along with this new approach came an interest in Dada which had gone largely unnoticed in Iceland. What Jón found there – in the works of Schwitters and others – clearly appealed to him though direct references are hard to find in his work.

One may perhaps wonder why Jón, with his background, did not apply himself instead to the conceptual art that so many of his contemporaries embraced and that can, when successful, be like philosophy and poetry rolled into one. Perhaps it was a question of temperament. Jón, a watchmaker’s son, preferred to proceed carefully and chose and approach that yielded to careful study and patient application rather that flair and showmanship.

Jón Laxdal has always lived in the north and that is where he has pursued his long study. We should not speak of isolation here, for of course human life proceeds in Akureyri much as it does anywhere else and the district has produced several of Iceland’s most prominent contemporary artists. But most of them moved to Reykjavík or even abroad while Jón chose to stay. This has left him somewhat outside the mainstream of Icelandic art but has, in turn, given him the time needed to concentrate on working out his ideas with such patience and industry as one could never hope to achive in the racier art scene of the capital. As a result, Jón has produced a magnificent body of work, complete and extensive beyond anything we are used to seeing in our fragmented urban environment.

The concrete poems opened Jón’s initial attempt at a visual presentation of his thought and in a remarkably short time he worked through its variations and eventually left them behind. Concrete poetry can be a little like op-art in that way, clever and often inspiring but lacking in depth and relevance. in the next several series, dating from the mid-to-late 1980s, Jón proceeded to work through the various styles and presentations of the collage, exploring its materials and methods. Each series has its own set frame, proportions and scale, that determine the construction of each piece based on the material he uses. Within those limits, Jón again systematically varies his approach to test the possibilities and limits of his given format. Some pieces might be almost wholly abstract while others take their cue from the cuttings and scraps he has chosen to work with. Yet others are examine the compositional possibilities of the letterforms and glyphs themselves.

This methodology is of course well known in art but in Jón’s case it is more like watching a philosopher dissecting a concept, testing it with variables and gradually reducing it to its core. Little by little, Jón tackles new aspects of his medium and its materials. Along with his extensive formal investigations, he has studied colour and texture and finally even the content of the texts he selects for reuse, as well as their various contexts and connotations.

Through concentrated work and patient thought Jón has achieved such mastery of his art that his works provide us with his coherent analysis of both his contemporary environment and its historical sources. By ceaseless variation and experimentation he has found an approach that allows him to take on any subject.