Exhibition: Sun and Moon. Andreas Eriksson in dialogue with Ivan Aguéli

Andreas Eriksson (born in 1975) constructs visual structures using blocks, layers, and brushstrokes, which can be interpreted as ways of experiencing the world. Geological strata, minerals, moss, leaves, or bark… His paintings are layers of materiality, accumulations of energy and time in varied densities and forms. His art is fundamentally tied to one single place: Medelplana, in southwest Sweden, near Lake Vänern. The earthy and saturated colors of his paintings come from the landscapes that surround his home and constitute his daily life.

Facing the monumental paintings of Andreas Eriksson are about a dozen small-format works by Ivan Aguéli, a painter and mystic born in 1869 and who died in 1917. Their small size indicates a movement: these works were created on the paths that took 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 sun-bleached, luminous, the forms are reduced and simplified, almost cubist, as if painted in haste, with fervor. The works of Ivan Aguéli were selected by Andreas Eriksson, who wished to give them a place of their own in his exhibition. Through their palette, motifs, atmosphere, and approach, the works of the two artists are almost opposites. Aguéli's brilliant light and vast skies; Eriksson's dark, mineral earth.

Aguéli was convinced that art could be a portal to a higher truth. His entire life was an incessant quest, driven by various spiritual, political, and aesthetic doctrines. A journey that, 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 motion, 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, and trees in Andreas Eriksson's work; sky, sun, and light in Ivan Aguéli's. 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 form. With a text by Sara Arrhenius.

Curator: Sara Arrhenius, director of the Swedish Institute

Thanks to the Embassy of Sweden in France and to all the private lenders.
Special thanks to the friends and benefactors of the Swedish Institute for their generous support.

Practical information

Free admission