Ivan Aguéli

The Institut suédois dedicates its autumn exhibition to Andreas Eriksson (born 1975), a major figure in the contemporary art scene. His meditative work, with earthy and vegetal tones, is juxtaposed with that of Ivan Aguéli (1869 – 1917), an artist, thinker, and great traveller.

Andreas Eriksson constructs visual structures using blocks, layers, and brushstrokes, which can be interpreted as different 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 southwestern Sweden, near Lake Vänern. The earthy and saturated colours of his paintings come from the landscapes that surround his home and constitute his daily life.

Facing Andreas Eriksson's monumental paintings are about ten small-format works by Ivan Aguéli, a painter and mystic who died at the beginning of the last century.

Their reduced size indicates a movement: these works were created 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 bleached by the sun, luminous, the forms are reduced and simplified, almost cubist, as if painted in haste, with fervour. Ivan Aguéli's works were selected by Andreas Eriksson, who wished to give them a full place in his exhibition.

Through their palette, their motifs, their atmosphere, and their approach, the works of the two artists are almost opposites. Aguéli's dazzling light and vast skies; Eriksson's dark and mineral earth. 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 that, from Sala, led him to horizons as distant as Paris and Cairo.

From the Lutheran Protestantism of his childhood to Swedenborg's mysticism, and from anarchism to the esoteric Islam of the tradition s