IslANDs - Compressed Realities - Exploded Photoworks

The paradox of these typologies is that they concomitantly
draw attention to singularities as to the images as gestalt.
Regarding the landscapes, Bjarnason presents both the
trees and the forest. This modus operandi draws attention
to the overlooked, and regarding the latter to a world that
exudes beauty and mystery and because of their black and
white color scheme, it is also a universe that borders on the
ominous.
The repetition of images function inversely to Andy Warhol’s
emptying of pictorial meaning integral to his paintings: In
Warhol’s Marilynn Diptych (1962), for example, the icon’s
power is neutered via its faded and subsequent jaded
presence; the opposite occurs in Bjarnason’s serialism, for his
images are visually heightened via their multiplicity. However,
in certain instances there seems to be an interesting nonrepresentational
turn in his geographical renderings that
point to another way that these pictures can be understood.
Like his sculptures that are a confluence of both the purely
abstract and something else, the gridded landscapes as
well as the works based on celestial vistas are more than
studies of geographies or the stratosphere, for example. In
one sense, they have an affinity with the landscape tradition
of Caspar David Friedrich; specifically, the nineteenthcentury
German Romantic painter’s depictions of paintings
evocative of religiosity and mortality. Finitude for David as
well as Bjarnason, however, is not existential death or the
foreclosure of transcendence; rather, Bjarnason’s landscapes
are embodiments of sublimity, and his pictures of the heavens
are animistic renderings of humanity’s potential apotheosis.
This the conundrum of Bjarnason’s pictures as well as his art
in general: on the one hand they are imbued with beauty
and the aesthetic; on the other hand, they are explorations
of the human experience in all of its checkered glory. Gudjon
Bjarnason’s artistic and aesthetic acumen is a kind of Lazarus
effect; for his lush and visually poetic photographs make us
see anew what we have forgotten by way of animating the
inanimate.
11