Reykjavík Grapevine - 27.07.2018, Blaðsíða 25

“These concepts like gentrification,
touristification, banking, and exploit-
ative companies—it’s not easy to put
ideas like this into a painting.”
“Gamma are quite proud that they
support the arts,” he continues. “At the
same time as this was going on, Ragnar
Kjartansson had his big show at Hafnar-
husið, and they were the main benefac-
tor of that. But they’re quite often in
the news because people hate them.”
Nazi scumbags
Two of Þrándur’s other viral works are
even more overtly political. One depicts
Arion Banki executives disembarking
a plane, looking like Nazi officers. “I
really didn’t think that one would sell,”
he says. “But I had to paint it because it
was so funny. Sometimes these paint-
ings are ideas that are too good not
to paint. But it turned out there was a
law firm that had a lot of cases against
Arion Banki, and they bought it so their
clients could come into their office, see
the painting and laugh, and say, ‘Yeah,
scumbags.’”
The other is a macabre work that
is, perhaps unsurprising, yet to sell.
It depicts Iceland’s
Finance Minister Bjarni
Benediktsson pulling
on a pair of necropants.
“I didn’t know about the necropants
story until recently,” he smiles. “It’s
an old folk belief. The story goes that
you had to carve up a dead person
below the waist, all in one piece, and
wear the skin. Then you’d steal a penny
from a poor old lady and put it into the
ball sack. Then you’d become rich. But
you had to be careful not to die in the
pants, or you’d go to hell. When I read
the description, I thought, ‘I have to
paint this… but who should be wearing
them?’ And, well. Bjarni was the first
person that came to mind.”
“These painting are the ones that
people talk about,” he continues,
thoughtfully. “The thought process
behind them is different from the city
paintings. I just have to wait for the
ideas to come for the political satire
paintings. If I try to force it, it could get
banal. It’s satisfying when it happens,
but it makes me a bit more self-aware.
If I think ‘okay, I need another hit,’ it’s
like the pop business, then. So I try not
to think too much about it.”
Halcyon Reykjavík
Not all of Þrándur’s works are so contro-
versial. He also paints idyllic street
scenes—soothing environments free
from modern-day intrusions. Þrándur
admits that he’s more attracted to the
old Reykjavík than the new.
“I think it’s a shame when you have
a neighbourhood that’s in harmony,
then all of a sudden there’s something
ugly and modern,” he says. “Here, and
in other cities, people tend to visit the
old town, because it’s more pleasing.”
As well as being a form of resistance
to the changing city, there’s also an
economic reason for Þrándur’s more
sedate images. “It would be very easy
to paint hideous dystopias of modern
architecture, but I try to go the other
way, and paint what it could look like,
instead of pointing out the ugliness,”
says Þrándur. “And it makes more
sense financially. People wouldn’t buy
dystopia paintings. I haven’t received
any grants, or anything like that, so I
have to keep it in the back of my mind.”
However, Þrándur is mindful of
putting in curveball details to break up
the scene. “I try not to get too stuck in
nostalgia, so it’s only that and nothing
else,” he says. “I like to break things up
with some anachronistic details, and
so people have to ask when the paint-
ing might be set.”
Who drew
it better
Þrándur didn’t have a particularly art-
centric upbringing. His mother is a
Norwegian translator, who also had a
stint as a midwife—”she’s also inter-
ested in painting, but that came later, I
guess because of me,” he says—and his
father is a steel worker, union member
and “extreme left wing person,” based
up in Akureyri.
There is, however, another artist
is the family—his cousin Hugleikur
Dagsson, Iceland’s irreverent enfant
terrible cartoonist and comedian.
Hugleikur influenced Þrándur from an
early age. “He has a lot to do with it all,
actually,” he says. “He used to draw a lot
when we were kids. There was a bit of
competition between us. Once or twice
a year we’d compare sketchbooks, and I
was always very excited. We’d collabo-
rate on comic strips. And that’s where
it began.”
Today, their work couldn’t be more
visually different, with Þrándur’s
painterly canvasses forming a strong
contrast from Hugleikur’s vulgar stick-
men. “He went the minimalist way!” he
laughs. “But there are a lot of subjects
we have in common.”
Odd nerd room
Another big influence on Þrándur was
the painter Odd Nerdrum, who he
refers to as “my master.” After drop-
ping out of art school—because “the
way I was painting didn’t fit in with
what they were teaching”—Þrándur
was taken on as a pupil by the eccentric
Norwegian painter, who had taken up
residence in Iceland in the old library
building.
“I was a pupil of his for three years,”
Þrándur remembers. “He’s an eccen-
tric person. I had my little space in his
studio. I would more or less paint self-
portraits for those years. That’s what
he recommended, because that way
you always have a model. Hugleikur
had the idea that we should put a sign
on the door saying ‘odd nerd room.’”
Þrándur became part of a small
like-minded family that blossomed
around Odd’s studio. “He liked having
company, and wasn’t fond of being
alone,” he says. “There were always
people there, and if there wasn’t,
he’d call me and say ‘Come over, let’s
watch a film.’ His family was there
in the house too. He called himself a
‘kitsch painter’—he felt like he had
been kicked out of the art scene, which
is why he called himself ‘kitsch.’ It
became almost like a ‘kitsch society.’”
Inching to
the future
Despite his slow and meandering
outsider’s path, Þrándur’s endless
patience, his dedication to his craft,
and his artful combination of histori-
cal street scenes, intelligent politi-
cally-minded works, and what he calls
“splatter paintings” have found him
an ever-growing audience that isn’t
going anywhere. His paintings are sell-
ing as fast as he can make them, and
he has a show planned later this year
at Hannesarholt, to mark his fortieth
birthday. A collaborative exhibition
with Hugleikur is also in the works.
It seems only a matter of time
before he’s invited to produce a large
scale solo show in Reykjavík. He smiles
at the idea. “My biggest problem would
be to come to peace with my earlier
work, instead of thinking I could have
done them so much better,” he says.
“Some of my early work, I just don’t
want to see. I’ve always been very self-
critical. When I was 20, I’d be critical of
my drawings from when I was 16. But
it’s part of maturing to see that it’s just
what you were doing at that age.”
And with that, our time is up, and
Þrándur vanishes back up those creaky
stairs into his studio, his daydreams, and
the arresting world of his paintings.
"Grýla" (2009) "Gammamálverk" ("Vulture Painting," 2018)
25 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 13— 2018