Mundane intimacy * Ragnar Kjartansson

A performative act infused with theatricality, nostalgia and repetition, his celebrated project The End (Venice)—executed during the 2009 Venice Biennale—elevates painting to a time-based medium, where the artist created one portrait per day across six months, converting the studio into a stage and the canvas into a diary of gesture, presence and light, by accumulating 144 paintings of the same model in slightly shifting poses, atmospheres and moods, Kjartansson transforms repetition into a mode of devotion, echoing musical riffs or meditative rituals, what distinguishes this body of work is its embrace of romantic futility, where process overrides result, echoing the artist’s broader practice which includes durational performance, video, drawing and sound, in this massive wall installation, the viewer becomes immersed in a temporal archive, confronted not by a single image but by a chorus of variations, each painting whispering a slightly different version of the same truth, this strategy destabilizes authorship and finality, pushing painting into the territory of endurance, memory and theatrical excess, much like his video The Man, featuring blues legend Pinetop Perkins, Kjartansson’s works are elegiac yet playful, built on the melancholic charm of things fading, looping, lingering, in this sense, his oeuvre dissolves boundaries between disciplines and affirms art as an act of sustained attention—at once sincere, ironic and profoundly human.