From the catalogue for the exhibition
Deep into the Painting “Djúpt í Málverkinu” in 1998
By Jón Proppé
The subject of the painter is not only colors and forms, even if Kandinsky had encouraged dealing with nothing else. Paintings are not only made from abstract concepts and clear surfaces, but from the material, thick and heavy like nature itself, and is thus not only a replica of nature or coverage about it, but a part of it, a thing among things.
The feeling for this materialness of the painting — for the painting as an earthly thing — makes it possible for the painter to associate it as some sort of symbol of the world, of nature. It is not the abstract in the painting that allows it to mean other things, to be some sort of a formula that makes us read something about the world, but the fact that the painter is always already dealing with the world itself. When he puts color on canvas, draws a line or determines a surface, then he has not only said something about the world, but he has also created the world. Thus, his feelings towards the painting that he is creating is at the same time his feeling towards the world.
Margrét Sveinsdóttir pulls out this materialism clearly form her paintings by making them thick to build up the paint on the canvas so the surface becomes heavy, where the texture and form become one and the color becomes three dimensional.
The patterns on her works — symmetrical repeating of the same forms and colors — underscore more her feeling for the connection between the painting and nature, even if the forms do not reflect natural forms. It is not the remaking of nature that appears here, the artwork itself manages to become a natural marvel that Margrét determines and “packs into” the painting.
The work demonstrates at the same time Margrét’s attitude towards the painting, and its role and relationship to the world. Her patterned surfaces and the build up of paint can be seen as an experiment in calming and simplifying the subject – to make a frame that excludes all external disturbance and makes it possible for us to deal with our world like the artist has done: with pure canvas and clear colors.
The method and the technique that Margrét uses has, of course, not appeared out of nowhere. We could trace it back throughout art history all the way back to Monet and Cézanne; the process of materialism of the artwork, and its objective reality, has been one of the main subjects of modern art. But that kind of revision is of no relevance because it is the way each painter chooses to process his work that matters, how he selects things to explore that matter, how he makes the things that have been explored throughout history his, and how manages to extract from them his personal vision, the vision of the world and the purpose of the painting. That project of the painter will never cease, but the work of Margrét demonstrates that she is moving quite ahead.