Olafur Eliasson, the sculptor of sunshine faces the canvas: “If you relax the obsession with results, you become less defensive” | Culture | EUROtoday

The preliminary impression when visiting the exhibition by Olafur Eliasson (Copenhagen, 59 years outdated) on the Elvira González gallery, the fifth that he has featured on this Madrid house, is that of discovering himself in entrance of a proposal noticeably completely different from what could be anticipated from the famend artist and, on the similar time, completely identifiable. Something like touchdown in the midst of a room by no means seen earlier than, however crossed by an aroma already felt. “It is a very different exhibition from most of the ones I do,” Eliasson himself concedes, after touring to Madrid for the opening of the exhibition originally of March, in a chat with EL PAÍS on the couch within the gallery workplace. “But the truth is that I have always made works on paper, and I have drawn literally almost every day since I was a teenager.”

Trained on the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, the artist, of Icelandic origin and dwelling in Germany, practiced portray throughout his research. He turned identified for his multimedia items that experiment with gentle or water, installations, sculptures or pictures that abound within the twin scientific and humanistic exploration of pure phenomena. In Your immeasurable growth of flames (till April 25), a choice of 19 work and two gentle installations carried out all through 2025 and 2026 in collaboration together with his Berlin studio, Eliasson returns to that medium to discover from new angles a few of the themes which have marked his profession: concepts such because the position of probability and accident in creation, the boundaries that our management encounters, and notion as a remodeling agent of actuality.

On the white partitions of Elvira González’s rooms, a sequence of darkish scenes of a cosmic or mobile aura emerge, populated by adjoining or superimposed spheres, which alternate with spherical canvases the place intense colours develop from the middle to the perimeters, within the method of the waves produced by a stone thrown right into a pond or the concentric circles of the part of the trunk of a tree. “They are made with dye, like what you put in your hair or use on your clothes,” explains Eliasson, wearing black from neck to toe, in distinction to his iridescent work. “While the watercolor or oil paint stays on the surface, the dye goes through it, so if you look at the painting from the other side, it is also tinted.”

This property of fluids, often called the “capillary effect”, returns the viewer misplaced within the thriller of this uncommon pictorial materiality to the readability of Eliasson’s attribute working methodology: analysis anchored within the legal guidelines of physics and chemistry and a gaze impregnated with curiosity for the pure world that surrounds us and of which we’re an integral half. A conceptual continuity that shouldn’t be confused with fashion, a catchphrase, the artist believes, of younger creators who replicate what has been profitable for them and which, due to this fact, “should be avoided.” “I think that style takes away from contemporaneity, it gets lost in a past model,” he factors out. “Malevich’s black square has no style: it is still a contemporary painting.”

within the sequence Seven Days of Sunlight (2026), seven works devoted to every of the times of the week, the artist launched components equivalent to warmth or air currents to permit the colours to occupy the canvas on their very own, with out an executing hand. In Transformative Self-Led Colours (2026) positioned the dumbbells with which he trains to exert a strain of 30 kilos on a skinny metal plate positioned on prime of a stack of watercolor papers, in order that the ink infiltrated to generate a sequence of various however interconnected work. “I wouldn’t say that they have painted themselves,” summarizes the artist, “although I have not painted any of these works.”

Close and calm, targeted on his speech, Eliasson reveals on his cellular the photographs of a visit to Japan the place he photographed a black lacquered desk that tasks the reflection of whoever appears to be like at it. It is, as he explains, one of many methods that he has studied to include into his observe, together with others equivalent to Japanese woodcut – which makes use of strain as a software – or the marbling of conventional bookbinding, the place water and oil, two immiscible liquids, are introduced into contact to generate distinctive patterns on the floor of the paper. Listening to him, it’s apparent that these works could have been carried out in days, however they’ve been a course of for years.

“In my beginnings I started with the camera, photographing flashes,” Eliasson continues in reference to that lacquered desk that he confirmed on his telephone, a sort of black mirror that returns the photographs wrapped in a flash of sunshine. “Normally, flare is considered a mistake, and cameras have more and more additions to get rid of it. However, lenses used to produce flare, and you never knew how big it was going to be,” he says. From that concept, and from his “love” for these supposed visible imperfections, comes the title of the exhibition, the place the time period he makes use of in English, “flares”, has been translated as “flares”.

During his greater than three many years within the business, crossed by milestones equivalent to The Weather Projectan iconic set up from 2003 that warned of local weather change within the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern or, extra not too long ago, his nice 2020 retrospective that traveled from the Tate to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the place it needed to shut as quickly because it opened and was resumed later as a result of covid parenthesis, if there may be one factor that Eliasson has clearly extracted from the world of artwork, and from tradition as an entire, it’s his vital involvement with “truth and honesty.” “Culture is becoming an important dynamic force in our society,” he says. “It’s not organized around a CEO, but it’s a great system.”

It is that integrity inherent to artwork, he provides, the pressure that ought to information his observe in these occasions of “Epstein and artificial intelligence.” “It is becoming very difficult to be truly sincere,” he displays. “And that’s when you start to realize that making art often has to do with relaxing your attachment to results. If you look at the world, there is an obsession with results. Everything is results. And if you relax that obsession, you become less defensive. This makes you more vulnerable and therefore easier to criticize or attack, although it also automatically makes you more honest.”

Perhaps to guide by instance, the artist takes out his telephone once more and searches by way of his information once more. He reveals a video the place he sings a Janis Joplin track together with his two kids, he on the guitar, an instrument he performs like interest and which I had deliberate to take pleasure in in Madrid as a listener at a flamenco live performance. “I don’t usually do this in interviews,” he laughs earlier than placing his telephone again. Before saying goodbye and consuming the espresso that had been ready on the desk, he thanks this newspaper for the eye of his work. I already mentioned it earlier than: artwork and its honesty, additionally understood as an act of “listening,” “is absolutely essential for the well-being of the world.”