At
the opening of Johann Eyfells' current exhibition, one of his
former students, now a scientist, presented him with a piece of
slate. The rock contained the fossilized imprint of a prehistoric
sea creature.
"See, it's one of nature's 'collapsions,' " the student said,
laughing, as if nature had required millions of years to accomplish
the enigmatic art form - the "collapsion" - that has become Eyfells'
signature invention.
The gallery at the University of Central Florida has installed
a dozen or so of Eyfells' collapsions in honor of his retirement
last year from the university's art department. A companion selection
of framed collapsions on paper and cloth is on view at the Warehouse
Gallery in Orlando. And for several months now, downtown office
workers have been strolling past a setting of three Eyfells sculptures
at Orlando City Hall.
All this local attention comes after a run of quite astounding
international success. In 1992, Eyfells received a solo exhibition
at the national museum of his native Iceland and the next year
was featured in the Iceland pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Eyfells' sculpture has attracted attention at other international
exhibitions in Milan and in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates,
and this fall, his work was exhibited alongside such renowned
artists as Louis Bourgeoise in the lobby of the United Nations
building in New York City.
Artists, like prophets, are seldom honored in their own country,
so Eyfells' current local exposure is our best chance to approach
the work that has earned such respect in the international art
world.
It's not easy because, like so many contemporary artists, Eyfells
didn't just create art when he started. He has invented his own
medium, his own form of art, even his own words - "collapsion,"
"receptualism," "truthicity" - for his form of art.
Typically, Eyfells takes a blank material, such as paper, folded
cloth or rubber, and presses it for months between treated metal
plates or gigantic molds. For the collapsions, he paints the bottom
metal plate with a wet slurry or soup, then sandwiches paper or
cloth between it and a top "stamp" plate of varying metal alloys.
Under prolonged pressure, the paper or cloth "meat" of this sandwich
is shaped, stained and etched by the chemical reaction of slurry
and metal. The resulting works are partly image. They bear the
circular stamp of the plate, of course - and, within that, the
image of a cross or a spiral is often clearly intelligible. But
they are also partly sculpture. The cloth collapsions can be unfolded
to float eerily in the gallery space, and even the framed paper
works are pressed and corroded into a three-dimensional form.
And that's not all, Eyfells acknowledges, since the collapsion
process is akin to "the family of printmaking and even photography."
These works are not so much "mixed" media as they are a hybrid
medium all their own. "It's an amazing kind of remote control,"
Eyfells said in an interview, "a force field that both complies
with what I want to happen and always comes up with surprises."
Gravity and corrosion do the work of the artist's hand; they do
his will.
The titles indicate the elemental quality of these mysterious
works: "Ghost Encounters," "Difference as Essence," "Coordinates
Undetermined."
The most challenging of all Eyfells' works are probably the gigantic
rubber collapsions, of the largest more than 16-feet square. This
one, titled "Exemplars," contains the imprint of shapes resembling
tree stumps, arranged in two irregular concentric circulars. Wood
chips cover the work's surface in the negative space between these
images.
Here Eyfells has used the modern material of rubber to mimic the
petrifaction of wood, a collapsion that nature accomplishes over
eons.
The scale of the works is no homage to the virtuoso achievement
of the artist, although these works are incredibly laborious to
create - and all of it by hand, no bulldozers allowed. Rather,
they pay tribute to the vast scale of the natural world, which
finally humbles anything that human artists can fit inside an
art gallery.
It makes sense that the noted critic Donald Kuspit, writing in
1992, would associate Eyfells' sculpture with "Robert Smithson's
earth art as a kind of rebellion against the modernist idea of
sculpture as construction." But, ironically enough, mammoth earth
works like Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" and James Turrell's Rhoden
Crater project rely on civilization - they do use bulldozers.
As Kuspit noted, "Eyfells takes sculpture back to its prehistory
in nature, obviating the civilized idea of it as the engineering
of space."
At the same time, Eyfells' methods - especially the painting of
the bottom plate with slurry - shares much with the abstract expressionism
current during his youth. "I'm like Jackson Pollock," the artist
says with a laugh, 'except I paint from below."
Eyfells' process is also rooted in his geographic and geological
origins, as UCF gallery director Kevin Haran remarks in his brochure
commentary. Iceland is a place where Earth's seething core is
near the surface, bursting through in hot springs and scraped
bare by glaciers.
It has no deep cushion of alluvial soil like the Mesopotamian
flood plains, no 30-foot layer of buffalo dung like North America's
praries. In Iceland, human civilization holds on by its fingernails.
So it makes sense that this Icelandic artist - acclaimed as one
of Iceland's greatest living artists - should have retraced the
history of art back to before the cave paintings and those first
stone-chipped figurines. Eyfells' difficult and mysterious art
hearkens back to the first art that humans recognized, those fossils
and formations left by the cosmic hand of nature.
Philip E. Bishop is professor of humanities at
Valencia Community College.
