Ivan Aguéli

The Institut suédois devotes its autumn exhibition to Andreas Eriksson (born 1975), a major figure of the contemporary art scene. His meditative work, in earthy and plant-like tones, is set alongside that of Ivan Aguéli (1869 – 1917), artist, thinker and great traveller.

Andreas Eriksson builds visual structures out of blocks, layers and brushstrokes, which may 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 varying densities and forms.

His art is fundamentally tied to one single place: Medelplana, at the foot of the Kinnekulle plateau, in south-west Sweden, near Lake Vänern. The earthy, saturated colours of his paintings come from the landscapes surrounding his house and forming his everyday life.

Alongside Andreas Eriksson's monumental paintings are displayed around 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 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 within 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 was convinced that art could be a gateway to a higher truth. His whole life was a relentless quest, carried by various spiritual, political and aesthetic doctrines.

A journey that, from Sala, led him to horizons as distant as Paris and Cairo.