Sun and Moon. Andreas Eriksson in dialogue with Ivan Aguéli

Andreas Eriksson builds visual structures by means of blocks, layers and paint strokes, which can be interpreted as so many ways of experiencing the world. Geological strata, minerals, moss, leaves or bark… His paintings are superpositions of materiality, accumulations of energy and time in varied densities and forms. His art is fundamentally linked to one single place: Medelplana, at the foot of the Kinnekulle plateau, in south-west Sweden, near Lake Vänern. The earthy and saturated colors of his paintings come from the landscapes that surround his house and make up his daily life.

Facing Andreas Eriksson's monumental paintings are a dozen small-format works by Ivan Aguéli, a painter and mystic who died at the beginning of the last century. Their reduced size points to a movement: these works were made on the paths that led him far from his native Sala – a small mining town, located in a mountainous region of central Sweden. The landscapes evoke the south; they are washed out by the sun, luminous, the forms are reduced and simplified, almost cubist, as if painted in haste, with fervor. Ivan Aguéli's works were selected by Andreas Eriksson, who wished to give them a place of their own in his exhibition. Through their palette, their motifs, their atmosphere and their approach, the works of the two artists are almost opposites. The brilliant light and vast skies of Aguéli; the dark and mineral earth of Eriksson.

Ivan Aguéli was convinced that art could be a portal to a higher truth. His entire life was an incessant quest, driven by different spiritual, political and aesthetic doctrines. A journey which, from Sala, led him to horizons as distant as Paris and Cairo. From the Lutheran Protestantism of his childhood to the mysticism of Swedenborg, and from anarchism to the esoteric Islam of the Sufi tradition.

At first glance, one might think that the differences between the two artists could not be greater. Ivan Aguéli, the anarchist, the Sufi, whose life as a wanderer in search of wisdom led him to a premature death in extreme poverty. And Andreas Eriksson, whose art is born from a single place. One in perpetual movement, the other having made stillness a necessary condition for painting. But seeing their works side by side, the biographical differences seem to blur. The presence of the sensible is what unites them. Earth, stones, trees for Andreas Eriksson; the sky, the sun and light for Ivan Aguéli. These paintings live in the same atmosphere and respond to a common quest for truth.

Parallel to the exhibition, a book presents the works of the two artists in mirror. With a text by Sara Arrhenius.