Notes Toward Nothing: Steingrímur Gauti Ingólfsson

Steingrímur Gauti Ingólfsson’s paintings begin without a fixed image in mind. Canvas and linen are folded, layered and worked on the floor with acrylic paint, dry pigment and binder. Paint is rolled, brushed, scraped and pressed across surfaces that are only partially visible. When the materials are unfolded, separated or reassembled, an image emerges that the artist has participated in making but has never fully seen before.

Chance plays a role in this process, but the paintings are not accidental. Ingólfsson deliberately limits his control, then responds to what the material produces. Works may be turned, cut apart, sewn together or revisited years later. Fragments and traces move between paintings, allowing earlier decisions to reappear in new configurations.

This process creates a tension between intention and recognition. A mark may become significant only after it has appeared; a cut can open another possibility; a seam can become both interruption and continuation. The paintings accumulate these decisions without settling into a single conclusion.

At the centre of Ingólfsson’s practice is a desire for the finished painting to retain something of the openness of a sketch: its immediacy, uncertainty and capacity to remain unresolved. The paintings may be physically demanding and repeatedly worked, dismantled and reconstructed, yet their surfaces often retain a sense of restraint.

Notes Toward Nothing takes this openness as its point of departure. “Nothing” does not describe an absence, but a refusal of a predetermined conclusion — the possibility of working intensely without knowing in advance what the work must become.

What remains of the sketch is not its smallness or speed, but its openness.