Andreas Eriksson builds visual structures through blocks, layers and brushstrokes, which can be read as so many ways of experiencing the world. Geological strata, minerals, moss, leaves or bark… His paintings are superimpositions of materiality, accumulations of energy and time in varied densities and forms. His art is fundamentally tied to a single place: Medelplana, at the foot of the Kinnekulle plateau, in south-western Sweden, near Lake Vänern. The earthy, saturated colours of his paintings come from the landscapes that surround his home and make up his everyday life.
Facing Andreas Eriksson's monumental paintings are about a dozen small-format works by Ivan Aguéli, a painter and mystic who died at the beginning of the last century. Their small size points to a movement: these works were made on the paths that led him far from his native Sala, a small mining town located in a mountainous region of central Sweden. The landscapes evoke the south; they are sun-bleached, luminous, their forms reduced and simplified, almost cubist, as if painted in haste, with fervour. Ivan Aguéli's works were selected by Andreas Eriksson, who wished to give them a place in their own right in his exhibition. In their palette, their motifs, their atmosphere and their approach, the works of the two artists are almost opposites. Aguéli's dazzling light and vast skies; Eriksson's dark, mineral earth.
Ivan Aguéli believed that art could be a gateway to a higher truth. His whole life was a relentless quest, carried by different spiritual, political and aesthetic doctrines. A journey that, from Sala, led him to horizons as distant as Paris and Cairo. From the Lutheran Protestantism of his childhood to the mysticism of Swedenborg, and from anarchism to the esoteric Islam of the Sufi tradition.
At first glance, one would think the differences between the two artists could not be greater. Ivan Aguéli, the anarchist, the Sufi, whose life as a vagabond in search of wisdom led to an early death, in extreme destitution. And Andreas Eriksson, whose art is born of a single place. The one in perpetual motion, the other having made immobility a necessary condition for painting. But seeing their works side by side, the biographical differences seem to fade. The presence of the sensible is what unites them. Earth, stones, trees in Andreas Eriksson's work; sky, sun and light in Ivan Aguéli's. These paintings live in a shared atmosphere and answer a common quest for truth.
Alongside the exhibition, a book presents the works of the two artists in mirror image. With a text by Sara Arrhenius.