Cassiopeia: Gudny Gudmundsdóttir
Compositions, palette, arrows, and text create an architectural first impression, while archaic visual elements reminisce watercolour sketches by those early 20th century spiritists probing communication between the spiritual and material worlds. In Maison de Poseidon – someplace between a drawing, flow chart and score – the lines sometimes resemble structures (screen walls?), and other times point out movement or direction, a spiral, a curve. Three blue rectangles with single round corners framing the composition re-occur in Maison de Cassiopeia, but this home seems to have different gravitational pull (she lives in a diamond). Other works, like the German-titled Der Sphinx and Der ethiopische Garten, hint radical modernist architects’ megalomanic plans – with linear cities based on an abstraction of the shape of the human body with head, spine, arms, and legs. Or should these constellations, rather than maps, be seen as instructions? As a musical arrangement, or a configuration for dance?
Ferdinand Leger wrote somewhere that he sets “curves against straight lines, patches of colour against plastic forms, pure colours against subtly nuanced shades of grey”. However, the distinctive inscriptions and titles in German, French and English suggest less formal levels of interpretation, and Guðný Guðmundsdóttir sends me down the rabbit hole of Greek mythology as I try to comprehend the relationships between the named figures in the exhibition: Cassiopeia, the Nereid, queen of Ethiopia and mother of Andromeda who lives in the Northern sky as punishment for her vanity (here, also in the form of a cat). Poseidon, who wanted to send a tsunami to reprimand Cassiopeia for declaring her beauty. And who, when she turned out to be resourceful enough to defended herself, sent a sea monster to destroy her. Fate has always been the realm of the gods, though even the gods are subject to it. The solution was to sacrifice her daughter, Andromeda. But when the monster was about to devour Andromeda, Persus arrived on Pegasus, the winged horse (in other versions wearing Hermes winged sandals) and slayed the monster.
In Guðmundsdóttir’s watercolours, the blue-to-green palette of the Mediterranean Sea is combined with soft hues of peach, intertwined with greys, pencilled lines, and the odd oil pastel like in Tragédienne de l’ouest. Unexpectedly, the image of a fighter jet materializes in what first appeared to be a celestial diagram or an eye (Manœuvre divine – mur du son).
Juxtaposed against the image of a winged horse (Barrier of sound) the myths are brought into contemporaneity. In some versions, Pegasus was born from the blood of Medusa when Perseus beheaded her. The horse sprang fully formed from the blood of the Gorgon as it spilled onto the ground. I remember reading somewhere that when Perseus set out to slay the monster sent by Poseidon, he held up the head of Medusa, turning the sea monster into stone and thus saving Andromeda from one monster with the head of another. The chain of destiny can perhaps only be grasped one link at a time. In the exhibition there is a small clay sculpture of a seated woman. I imagine that it must be Themis, the personification of justice, goddess of wisdom and good counsel, and interpreter of the gods' will. In the realm of human fate, questions become more important than answers.
Text ; Jonatan Habib Engqvist
