Ye Presences of Nature in the sky
And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!
And Souls of lonely places! can I think
A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed
Such ministry, when ye through many a year
Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,
On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,
Impressed upon all forms the characters
Of danger or desire; and thus did make
The surface of the universal earth
With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,
Work like a sea?
William Wordsworth
The Prelude
The Huldufólk are the “hidden people” of Iceland, inhabiting its scabrous volcanic landscape, its cliffs and crags, its nooks and crannies, its hills and farms and rocks and streams. Part fairy, part angel, part elf, part nature spirit, their hidden-ness consists of their being incorporeal, but their incorporeality does not entail absence: to the contrary, they are always there, a kind of genius loci, in and of the landscape, even when unseen. Although they can and indeed on occasion do appear in human guise, visible to the eyes of ‘normal’ folk — but only when and where they choose to do so, only under their own conditions, on their own terms. In other words, they can not be cajoled nor conjured nor in any other way obligated to appear; they reveal themselves.
Hreinn Fridfinnsson — Icelandic by birth and upbringing — has explicitly referenced the Huldufólk in works that span nearly the entirety of his career. For instance, Sacred and Enchanted Places (1970) is series of triptychs that combine photographs of sites in Iceland said to be inhabited by the Huldufólk with written descriptions of the curses placed by the Huldufólk on those sites (although they are for the most part benign, the Huldufólk are at times defiant and even capable wrath and harm when crossed, a wrath that is usually issued through unbreakable curses placed on people, places and objects.) Another work from nearly 30 years later, Tungustapi (1998), depicts the topographically dramatic site in Iceland that is known as the ‘Cathedral of the Huldufólk’, while the more recent Green Glass (2020) again combines photo and text in recounting a mischievous intervention of the Huldufólk in the storage area of a museum (a museum dedicated to “Folk and Outsider Art” no less.) Fridfinnsson has also spoken of the Huldufólk regularly in interviews and statements over the years, whether with regard his own work and personal experience, or to their place in the collective Icelandic psyche.
But Fridfinnsson is no regionalist nor folklorist, despite these overt references to regional folklore in certain works and words, and despite the palpable sense of Icelandic identity that infuses so much of his oeuvre; to the contrary, Fridfinnsson, as artist, has been informed by, participated in and contributed to various purposively global avant-garde art movements and networks from his earliest work to the present, movements that sought to reimagine the conventions and even the very language of art. Instead, these recurring references to the Huldufólk point us toward an essential yet elusive concern that runs throughout Fridfinnsson’s work; that of establishing a connection — a portal — to an aspect of reality that, like the Huldufólk, accompanies us at all times but that so often lies unperceived beneath the hard veneer of daily experience. As Fridfinnsson himself has commented about what drives his practice:
“I am trying to establish contact with underlying forces which I can’t define. They link everything in a way which obliterates the frontiers between nature outside — the countryside — and the nature of the psyche, which goes on inside our heads.1”
Fridfinnsson’s earliest medium was painting, in which he was trained in the 1950s and through which he first expressed himself in abstract imagery stylistically indebted to Mondrian (an influence it in some ways still retains in other media, particularly with regard to a simplified chromatic sensibility.) Launched in the medium of painting, his work soon evolved, in keeping with less conventional, more trans-disciplinary and performative formats pursued by certain art movements of the era, such as Fluxus, and particularly in keeping with the restless and iconoclastic work of Dieter Roth, who at the time was living in Iceland and whose influence was seminal among Fridfinsson’s circle of young artists2. Indeed, by 1965, in conjunction with the first Fluxus event in Iceland — a concert by Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman which inaugurated, remarkably, given Iceland’s remoteness, the international pair’s first major European tour — the 22-year-old Fridfinnsson curated an exhibition of “graphic music” with scores by some of the more radically experimental composers of the time, including John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. That same year Fridfinnsson, along with a small group of fellow Icelandic artists, formed the avant-garde artist collective SÚM in Reykjavík, a collective that would prove to be a catalyst in the development of Icelandic art of the 1960s and 70s and would provide a platform for its international visibility. In the years that followed Fridfinnsson travelled extensively in Europe and ultimately settled in Amsterdam (where he still lives), while his work continued to partake of various avant-garde idioms of the era — Land Art, Conceptual Art, language-based art, performance, etc., — with Marcel Duchamp’s work and thought exercising a crucial influence throughout.
An early work by Fridfinnsson — Dropping by at Jón Gunnar’s (1964 - 1992) — encapsulates the concerns underlying his practice during this period, while at the same time presages to a remarkable degree the delightfully idionsyncratic direction it would take in later years. In creating the work, Fridfinnsson kicked holes through a discarded door that he had salvaged from a friend’s house, and then gesturally painted sections of the wood that remained in swaths of primary colors. Part painting, part sculpture, part-objet trouvé, part performance, Dropping by at Jón Gunnar’s voices various contemporaneous avant-garde concerns of the time: the hybridity and everyday-object orientation of Nouveau Réalisme; the destruction-creation dichotomy of Fluxus’s performance-generated methodologies; perhaps even the obsessive and insistent hole-making found in Dieter Roth’s work. Above all, Dropping by at Jón Gunnar’s breaks down — a breakage that is literal and metaphorical — the tenuous (and ultimately dubious) barrier between art and life, in keeping with the ethos of these aforementioned artistic currents, which the 21-year-old Fridfinnsson had already fully assimilated, and which he would use as a point of departure to develop his own distinctive artistic practice.
A doorway marks a portal, a point of passage, a node of contact and connection; a hole in a door is a portal through such a portal; the search, the discovery and ultimately the sharing with others of such portals (and such portals-through-portals) has been an ongoing aspect of Fridfinnsson’s work, from Dropping by at Jón Gunnar’s unto the present-day, from its roots in a particularly Icelandic (and landscape-oriented) identity to its embrace of universal experience.
Doors and windows (on a literal level) recur throughout Fridfinnsson’s body of work, whether as objects or in photographs and videos (or combinations of these formats.) These include Five Gates for the South Wind (1971 - 1972), a gate built in a remote site along the seacoast in the south of Iceland, a plain, white-painted, free-standing gate through which nothing (or at least nothing visible) passes other than the south wind, and which Fridfinnsson, using his preferred method at the time, first built and then documented in photographs and text (while abandoning the object itself to the elements.) It also includes works such as Seven Times (1978 - 1979), an odd photographic sequence involving a man, a window, a curtain, and all that lies beyond; First Window (Homage to Marcel Duchamp) (1992), a photographic composition that powerfully invokes the ineluctable connective tissue lying between but also separating indoors and outdoors (while also nodding to Duchamp’s 1920 window-sculpture Fresh Widow); From Home (2009), a pair of deceptively simple photographs that somehow succeed in conveying the warmth but also the melancholy distance of the hearth and home; and Door (2016), a work that, in subtly emphasizing the keyhole that perforates a door seems to have evolved directly from Dropping by at Jón Gunnars, but that (again, like that earlier work) also belongs squarely to the artistic currents of its own place and time. And this is but to cite only a few of many such works. But the role of the portal in Fridfinnsson’s work goes beyond that of mere motif, despite its recurrence in the literal form of gates and windows and doorways and the like.
Again, a portal is a point of passage, a node of contact and connection, a something through which something else might be able to flow. Yes, doorways and windows are indeed portals. But so are dreams, portals to something the experience of which cannot be denied but that, as experience, cannot be touched, cannot be grasped, cannot be held, cannot even be experienced except through the portal of the dream: the dream itself is the experience of the dream, everyone’s dreams, and in this specific context the dreams that Fridfinnsson recounts with such deftness and ease. As, albeit somewhat counterintuitively, are the mirrors that flash back and forth through Fridfinnsson’s oeuvre. As — perhaps even more counterintuitively — are the rocks Fridfinnsson incorporates with such delicacy and yet such solidity into his work, portals across the eons of geological time, or (in the case of the meteors) across the vast distances of outer space. Indeed, even language is a portal in Fridfinnsson’s exquisite handling of it in his text-based works and delicately worded titles — or rather, language is above all a portal, in Fridfinnsson’s work and everywhere else. Fridfinnsson’s work makes all this manifest, albeit subtly; and once detected, it allows for an appreciation of a strand of cohesive continuity running through his entire practice.
For instance, the very title of the work Portal (2016) points us to this facet of Fridfinnsson’s work. Simply assembled out of a string of onyx beads strung between two mirrors placed along a vertical axis, Portal opens a dizzying and infinite two-way passageway between material and immaterial realities, one more perhaps more tactile yet neither more ‘real’ than the other on an experiential level. A similar portal is established in the emblematic work Attending (1973), which consists of two photographs and accompanying subtitles. In one photograph (sub-titled “Attending Earth”,) a hand-held mirror is held up against a sky-blue sky, while the reflection ‘within’ the oval mirror presents us with an image of the grassy earth. In the other (sub-titled “Attending Sky”,) the directional structure has been reversed: the mirror is held in front of the grassy earth while reflecting the sky-blue sky. The photographs are ingeniously composed, with background, foreground and reflection equally sharing a single visual field in each. In the wonderful simplicity of their juxtaposition the paired photographs capture the entire world, from earth to sky and back again. And in both photographs, the subtitles alert us to the key role played by the mirror’s reflectivity; it is what allows us to ‘attend’, i.e. to pay attention so as to be able to see something that is undeniably ‘there’ but not immediately visible — a profound act that underlies Fridfinnsson’s entire approach to creating art. Perhaps even more emblematic of this aspect of Fridfinnsson’s practice are the pair of works bearing the title So Far (1976; 1976 - 2001.) The first is a single black-and-white photograph, the other a set of two color photographs; in each of the photographs, a hand reaches — yearningly, achingly — toward a reflection of itself: or is it the other way around? A question and a quest are what drive the work, and yet at the same time they — that question, that quest — are futile, doomed to never achieve resolution. In this sense the dual-versioned So Far is something of an intellectual conundrum — a conundrum that is also somehow heart-breaking. Thus mirrors, in Fridfinsson’s use of them (which extends far beyond the handful of examples referred to above), are a means toward establishing a kind of trans-dimensional portal; in other works he utilizes other means in order to establish other sorts of portals across space and time. For instance, Drawing a Tiger (1971) juxtaposes two photographs: one shows the nine-year-old Fridfinnsson, bundled up and drawing an imaginary (absent yet not necessarily non-existent) tiger while seated on a hay bale on a remote farm in Iceland; the other is of the 28-year-old Fridfinnsson, seated on a bench in Amsterdam, against the backdrop of the more manicured landscape of a Dutch city park, also drawing a tiger (although the page before him appears to be blank, as if the ‘tiger’ perhaps did not survive the journey.) Drawing a Tiger establishes a portal across time and space, from Iceland to Amsterdam and from childhood to adulthood, a portal that connects to and through the changed yet enduring figure of Fridfinnsson himself, and also through the changed yet enduring creative act
— that is, through art. Another example can seen in Mid-night Jump, Canneto Pavese, Oltrepó Italy, 1975 - 1976 (1975 - 2018), a Muybridge-like sequence of three photographs of Fridfinnsson jumping in the air precisely at midnight on December 31, 1975 and landing on January 1, 1976 and thus passing through a portal across the changing of the calendar years. And Fridfinnsson’s portals are also found in the stones that he has incorporated into various works, including You May Take One Stone With You (1977) and Composition with Meteorites, Magnets and Threads (2016); in these works, Fridfinsson presents the stones as messengers, messengers that have traversed portals through time and space, even going so far as to treat them as embodying changeable spirits within their hard minerality, revealing an animistic thought-structure that often appears in his practice.
These portals, both literal and metaphorical — doorways and windows, mirrors and rocks, the artist’s body itself, and any number of other manifestations — are myriad across the long arc of Fridfinnson’s body of work, persisting through the shifts of format and material and stylistic idiom. And in attempting to understand the full import of this persistence, it is worth returning to and examining the artist’s statement cited above, in which he expressed (in the profoundly careful wording that is characteristic of all Fridfinnsson’s use of language) his goal as “trying to establish contact with underlying forces which I can’t define…[and which] link everything in a way which obliterates the frontiers between nature outside — the countryside — and the nature of the psyche, which goes on inside our heads.”
Fridfinnsson is not trying to “define” but rather to “contact” these forces; moreover — and more important — these “forces” that Fridfinnsson aims to contact are already there, they are already linking everything, they are already obliterating the frontier between inside and outside, between the landscape and the psyche. In other words, the connection, the linkage, the obliteration, already exist; Fridfinnsson’s aim is to establish a connection to that very connection, a link to that very linkage, a portal to that already existing portal. In this regard Fridfinnson’s work might be thought of as fundamentally epiphanic, i.e. structured on the method of the epiphany; not the epiphany of the religious (Christian) usage, but rather an epiphany as a revelation of something that is already there, a light-like surface flash of understanding (from the Greek epi: on the surface and phanein: light) that changes nothing concrete or intrinsic, that changes nothing other than the portal of perception itself — which of course changes everything.
This fundamental aspect of Fridfinnsson’s modus operandi is wonderfully illustrated in the work Untitled (1999 - 2000), a photograph which shows Fridfinnsson cupping his hands so as to receive light that has been refracted through a prism. In the photograph there is no annunciation-like beam traversing the room toward Fridfinnsson’s hand — to the contrary, the light in the room is diffuse and even and balanced, a natural light, probably a morning light. And yet Fridfinnsson reaches out so as to be able to catch and thus share its spectrum of colors. The light itself is already there —- of course it is, otherwise there would be no photograph — as are the color waves of which it is composed; Fridfinnsson, in Untitled, merely makes them visible to us: merely, and magnificently.
In this work — as in so many of his works — Fridfinnsson employs nothing resembling force or even direct guidance outright, but rather — as with the Huldufólk who cannot be cajoled nor conjured into appearing, but rather will only reveal themselves — creates conditions propitious to epiphany, conditions that entail cultivating an attention and alertness to the portals that accompany us so that they, in return, might reveal themselves to us. In other words, to listening to landscape itself, listening in the fullest sense, much as the landscape itself — in keeping with the portals that Fridfinnsson has dedicated his art to, and which, as portals, are by definition dual-directional — is said to “listen” in the Emily Dickinson poem that lent this essay its title. This way of ‘attending’ to the world — this way of being in the world — holds regardless of whether that world be Iceland or Amsterdam or Miami or anywhere else, whether it be exterior or interior, material or immaterial, lived or dreamed: we all, together with our Huldufólk brethren, inhabit a landscape.
There’s a certain Slant of light (320) by Emily Dickinson
There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us – We can find no scar,
But internal difference – Where the Meanings, are –
None may teach it – Any – 'Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air –
When it comes, the Landscape listens – Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance On the look of Death –
1 Hreinn Friofinnsson, 'Artist Statement', 1987. cited in Hreinn Friofinnsson, exh. cat. (Grenoble: Magasin - Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, 1987). p. 14. Quoted in Bago, Ivana, “Hreinn’s Transmutations”, p 13, in Hreinn Fridfinnson Works 1964 - 2019, edited by Andrea Bellini and Krist Gruijthuijsen (Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, 2019)
2 “The Conceptual, the Romantic, and the Nonhuman: The SÚM Group and the Emergence of Contemporary Art in Iceland, 1965-1978” doctoral thesis by Heida Björk Árnadóttir,