Shadows have been central to Sigurður Árni’s painting since he first started to exhibit after finishing his education in France. That they play a greater role than what is to be expected in the work of most any painter is confirmed in his later canvases and drawings, many of which now show only shadows without any direct representation of the objects themselves. This would seem to overturn the usual order of things and is well worth examining in some detail.

We really know very little about how shadows inform our perception of the world thought various attempts have been made to research them, most importantly perhaps in the work of the gestalt psychologists. We know a lot, however, about how shadows work in pictures and there is a vast literature on that subject. Shadows have been a central concern in the development of modern art and their use was one of the most important innovations of renaissance painting in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By understanding how to use shadows, painters could separate their subject from the field by using contrasts of light and dark, chiaroscuro, instead of marking them in outline or by sharp colour contrasts. This opened a host of new possibilities that are still being explored by painters and analysed by academics. The paintings acquired a depth and richness beyond anything that had been seen before. They became more ‘naturalistic’ and permitted a much more dramatic approach that the mannerists of the sixteenth century exploited for all it was worth to endow even the most pedestrian subjects with significance and mystery. Today, shadows are studied by designers of computer games and a whole new field of psychology seems to have emerged to examine how shadows in the computer-generated spaces allow us to quickly identify objects and figures and shoot them up. Cool shading is the key to producing realistic three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional computer screen.

Much of Sigurður Árni’s early work seemed to aim at reducing the world to two dimensions. His paintings presented a flush surface on which shapes were arranged in strict formation. They resembled diagrams where all spatial relationships – even perspective – have been projected onto interleaved planes, much as cartographers project the curves and crags of the landscape onto their maps. These paintings remind one of studies for formal gardens – or golf courses which today have replaced the formal gardens that were the privilege of royals and aristocrats in former centuries. In these paintings, trees and ponds were arranged in strict order on a relatively flat field of colour. It would be a mistake, however, to read to much into this connection though formal gardens are an interesting subject of study in themselves. Sigurður Árni’s aim was to explore the possibilities of the painting itself and its surface – stripping down the theory to investigate the spaces that could be constructed and catalogue the dimensions contained in the flat layers of canvas and paint. Shadows were indeed key elements in this project but they did not themselves carry much meaning and were mainly used to organise the geometric relationship of the depicted objects.

Sigurður Árni’s paintings were not just formal studies, though. They were not merely intended to create an illusory formal world on the surface. His subject was, instead, that surface itself as became very apparent when he started to produce paintings with ‘holes’ – bare circles in the layers of paint through which one could see the unprimed canvas behind it. By adding shadows within these holes he managed to indicate a further space within the painting, separating the paint from the canvas.

“My ‘perforated’ paintings,” he said in an interview with art historian Auður Ólafsdóttir, “centre on the attempt to reach through the paint to the bare canvas beyond it, in effect to create a world in between the oil paint and the canvas.” This also represented a step beyond the world of the painting proper. By exposing the underlying canvas and then indicating a new space between the layers of the painting he reconstituted the relationship of objective reality and the inner world of the painting and this abstraction – the adoption of a perspective that encompasses both the illusion and the underlying reality – became the true subject of his work. We might call it a kind of deconstruction of the mysteries of perspective and depth but like most deconstructions it engenders new questions that prove to even more mysterious and complicated than the original ones.

When things are projected onto a flat surface or plane, the ontological properties of the things represented are altered and their relative ordering in our perceptual field is flattened out as well. Shadows, clouds or bursts of light now occupy quite as much space on the canvas as do the solid figures that perhaps are the actual subject of the painting. This is as much as saying that the picture has no depth; everything becomes simply forms on a field. Depth in painting is added though the careful manipulation of light and spatial relationships – this is the painters craft and though some of it is science, much is more akin to alchemy. To create perspective – depth – painters must create a carefully constructed geometrical world which involves much more than what is seen on the surface. Perspective requires a vanishing point within the painted scene to which the shape of the objects is bent to create the illusion of three-dimensional space. The vanishing point is relative to the position of the viewer who stands outside the painting but whose presence is the main reference for the whole undertaking. Shadows are even more complicated as their vanishing points are determined by the sources of light, not outside the painting, but within the scene depicted. One calculates them relative to the light source and the plane on which the shadow is to fall – a painted wall or table, say, that has already been manipulated to create an illusion of perspective. In a landscape painting the vanishing point of most shadows will be where a straight line drawn from the sun or moon intersects the horizon. The light source may, of course, be ‘off-stage’ outside the space we actually see in the scene on the canvas.

Sigurður Árni applies the craft of perspective not to create the illusion of represented reality, but to explore the possibilities of the planar space itself. The shadow of an object, cast on a wall, is a planar representation and is one of the many perspectives that go to make up the whole of that object. A painting is itself a planar projection onto the canvas and an unpainted circle, allowing the canvas to show through, is an opening onto another plane.

In Sigurður Árni’s later paintings, shadows and their complicated formal relationships, have become the primary focus. Be showing us only shadows, he excludes the things that one would expect to be the actual subject of the representation – plants, figures, chandeliers. These would now all seem to situated outside the painting, in the same space as the viewer. When viewing a painting of a chandelier on is tempted to turn to look behind oneself and up to the ceiling, to wherever the chandelier should be, depending on the available light sources in the gallery. In this way, the search for perspective would seem to have come around in a circle from creating an inner space in the painted scene base on the viewer’s position as he looks into it. These paintings instead create something in the space outside; new objects are created in our own world, however momentary that illusion might be. Film makers quickly caught on to these possibilities when they started to investigate their new medium early in the twentieth century. One of the most memorable uses of this technique was in F.W. Murau’s Nosferatu, shot in 1922, where the vampire’s shadow appears on a wall: If the vampire’s shadow is on the screen then he must be out here, in the theatre with us!

This is far more than an illusionist’s trick. Rather, it highlights important truths about how we perceive our world and how our representations – in art, but by extension in our culture as a whole – intervene to impose order and rationality on our unruly experiences. Our perceptual universe is a teeming and limitless abundance where we move, interacting with objects and with each other, each movement and action rippling through our entire world. Relationships are constantly being reordered and only though active and conscious participation do we make sense of it. The development of perspective and elaborate shading does not bring painting closer to lived perception; does not make it “more realistic” if by that we mean that it has become truer to the world as we inhabit it. The painting fixes a perspective and immobilises the viewer in his relation to the world of the painting, locking its objects along to the paths to its unmovable vanishing point. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty explained at length the gestural force of perception, perception as movement and participation in the world. In the perspective of the painting, by contrast, the world is fixed, tamed, rendered neutral. “The whole scene is in the past, in the mode of completion and eternity. Everything adopts an air of propriety and discretion. Things no longer call upon me and I an not compromised by them.” (Merleau-Ponty: The Prose of the World) In exposing these inner functions of the painting’s perspective, Sigurður Árni shows us the way back to a more active and critical appraisal of it relationship to our lived experience.

“Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations - always darker, emptier, simpler than these,” wrote Nietszche. Our ideas are empty shades when compared to the world of sensations which is always full, indeed overflows with detail and meaning, an inexhaustible fountain of experience and significance. With this in mind we might say that Sigurður Árni’s paintings have caught us out in the shadow world of out own minds, in the dim outline of that reality which we will never fully understand though we might tell ourselves we have it under control. He points up a metaphysical ambiguity in our perception which is bound to be quite unsettling, even when the implied subject is not a vampire but only a plant or a chandelier.