Hreinn Fridfinnsson — Claudine Papillon Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 9 → November 20, 2010

Hreinn Fridfinnsson’s new exhibition at Claudine Papillon Gallery is a roundtrip between the surface of things and the center of the earth. Its logic résides, as often in this artist’s work, in its paradoxes.

The Eye video welcomes us, surrounds us and traps us in a triangular optical play, by succeeding close views of an eye, and visions from this eye. On each side, two twin convex mirrors reflect one another, this Chinese box structure reminding us the possible circularity of looking, the distortion of reality by the retina, and gives us hints to understand the other pieces.

The sphere shape, which is both finite and infinite, is that of our world. The plumb line points at its center. Hanging from the ceiling as well, the Foucault Pendula extends verticality into a move, which tells about that of the Earth, its rythm and temporality. Hreinn Fridfinnson makes it fling small metallic elements standing like soldiers in a round row, and their fall makes a brief, recurring harsh sound. This « beat » sound evokes heartbeats or scansions in music, but thus isolated and used within a scientific device, it offers a bare representation of the initial sound everything came from, the Big Bang.

Just like the Earth does, the dancer turns around an axis, but he does it with his feet up in the air. Did he « fall on his head » or is he revolving down under the other side of the world ?

His symetrical clothes suggest we should choose the second hypothesis. Revolution, which also means rotation, can occur in all directions. The Corner piece is horizontal and parallel to the ground down below. Two (endlessness) signs are visible on it. One is carved in, the other sticks out. When assembled, they make the open corner piece into a full closed square entity.

The + and – signs, and above all what they mean, are also antipodes to one another. Here, Hreinn Fridfinnsson shows them face to face, unlike Janus’ features, although they share the same inverted complementarity. In spoken English, More or less signifies some kind of equivalence. More or less, we don’t know. As far as knowledge is concerned, we swing like the pendulum does, we change points of view like the dancer does. We open and close consecutive assumptions, opinions, books. In the wide scale video on the largest wall, books open because the wind flips through them. Spread onto the landscape, they stay clinched to the ground whereas pages spin. Nothing really flies away, no single part of their content is revealed. Gravity and wheightlessness combine in the knowledge these books enclose.