Liborio Termini
An Icelandic folktale tells of a God who travelled from
house to house and took away with him the most beautiful
children and the best of the livestock. The people lived
in terror of this divine predator, but they could not
escape the cruetly of the God.
One family hit on a solution: Underneath their house
they excavated a large cavern with a subterranean meadow.
There they hid their most beautiful children and animals.
The God passed by, looked around and said: "There
is nothing for me here, but I will ensure that from
this moment on whatever you have hidden beneath your
house shall forever remain there and live and prosper
in the bowels of the earth."
So it became. That is why, in Iceland, there are people
and animals, cities and meadows, underneath as well
as above the ground. It is as though there were two
Icelands: One nocturnal and lunar, populated by the
most beautiful, invisible creatures, the other a land
of daylight, visible and made of the realitiy that we
are already aware of.
This is a folktale, but I think it contains more than
what we find in common folktales. I think it is a myth
in disguise, that its form is hiding a mythology. Not
only the mythology that represents division and dualism
(of the visible and the invisible, day and night, above
and underneath, inside and outside, bady and soul, nature
and culture) which might characterize the Icelander´s
way of being and feeling, but first and foremost the
mythology that constitutes the theme - the myth - of
a "frontier", Considered as the place where
space dissolves as well as the idea of time that fills
that space. A place that is also a reservoir of symbols,
the great archive that feeds them and keeps them alive.
If it is true, as James Campbell has claimed, that the
main purpose of myth is to unify the world of nature
and the world of man, then what the above folktale continues
to tell us is the difficulties the Icelanders meets
in relating to a nature that can never become a "habitat",
can never be tamed and always stands stubbornly resisting
in complete autonomy and almost a religious indifference
ta man.
From these specific Icelandic circumstances it becomes
understandable that the Icelander, and expecially the
Icelandic artist, becomes aware that the symbol is the
only way that leads to what else would be impenetrable
for him. Therefore the symbol is never completely without
motivation. On the contrary it has something of the
concreteness of reality whose reflexes radiate in the
deep interiors of man. That might be the reason for
its archaic character, its primordial force that carries
us to the most obscure and magmatic parts of ourselves
and attaches itself to us without ever revealing itself
completely.
In the field I am describing here it seems to me that
Helgi Thorgils Fridjonsson is a true master, the artist
who in a happy and complex way transfers his representation
of the world to an entirely symbolic level. In his world
the symbol is not preceived as a mask to transform things,
nor as a means for interpreting or explaining the world,
but rather as a fact of nature, the form of the world,
its original expression.
This is why we find in his works a feeling of absolute
naturalness (a complete naturalism, I am tempted to
say) that rejects the allegory, the reference and the
epiphany, and demands of the viewer and absolutely unnatural
approach: To recognize himself anew; again because he
is already known although forgotten, familiar although
lost. In Fridjonsson´s paintings the symbol is
not only an enigma for the vision, but an authentic
passport for memory.
As in the folktale, the whole of Fridjonsson´s
work develops and is organized in a vever-ending mythology.
With a variation, though, that I think of no little
importance: The subterranean and nocturnal world of
invisibility has been transferred radically from beneath
to above, from the depths of the earth to the sky which
is as well populated by creatures that suggest the model
of division and duality: The somehow reinforced idea
of transgression (and identity) of Here and Elswhere,
of Self and the Other, as if a world of pure energy
had conquered the opaque weight of matter, liberated
man from gravity and given him wings to fly.
It is by no accident that in the world represented by
Fridjonsson, man is nothing but a biological form among
other biological forms, like a fish, a chicken, a pig,
a bird, a flower and the fruits of earth to which he
refers himself and to which he belongs.
Situated in the circularity of a world that links him
with other creatures of this world in a circular chain,
man is - like all other existing things - a centre and
a periphery, a part of a whole that admits no hiearchy.
Thus we can say that man loses the sense of history,
the measure that enables him to consist as a real being,
just as if some metaphysical authority had deprived
him of the only reality that can give him existential
cretitude.
It is nonetheless through this loss of history, this
challenge to our proud enlightenment that Fridjonsson
has calculated with precision, that man can straighten
himself out and penetrade into an essential primordial
reality, which he will never be able to abandon and
to which he is always forced to return: To find himself
again as nature (therefore the persons in his paintings
are always naked), to show exacly the incongurity that
civilzation has created between nature and history.
This incongurity, the twist itself, was generated at
the moment when history replaced nature, became its
substitude an killed it.
But Fridjonsson reminds us also that the human body
is not (not only) history, it is first and foremost
nature - and in his paintings the body is a dominating
sovereignty in a kind of rediscovery of the various
possibilities of its postures, in the wonder of the
first being appearing on earth to try movements, positions
and gestures in symmetry and harmony that doesn´t
make it different from the other creatures. Thus the
body constructs and invents its own rituals, which is
one way of bringing life to myth. Through this Fridjonsson
reclaims the myth and transforms it into an element
that not only constitutes a fundament for culture and
history, but as it appears in a representation that
shows the world at the origin of the world, it becomes
itself a critical motif.
In a way it is as if Fridjonsson was confronting culture
and history with the wonder of the first startling ray
of light to illuminate the Earth, with the wonder of
the first eye that looked upon the world.
I am not maintaining that this generates a feeling of
extremes or inadequacy, affectation or loss of purpose,
but there is no doubt that the Fridjonsson´s works
generate something that fills our considerations on
culture and history with irony. Something that stands
close to a critical and deconstructive method.
Therefore Fridjonsson attacks these two elements pointing
to the mythology of origin and the ideology ofof innocence
as mediated by Christianity. He reclaims their symbolism
and destroys it at the same time in order to allow man
to rediscover himself, truthfully naked.
Liborio Termini is a professor in film criticism
and film theory at the
University of Turin, Italy.