Ragnar Kjartansson: Mercy
Image credit: Portrait of Ragnar Kjartansson Photo: Rafael Pinho
There is something slightly deceptive about Ragnar Kjartansson’s work. It is beautiful, often extravagantly so, and frequently very funny. His films unfold through music, repetition and theatrical performance, populated by melancholy musicians, romantic figures, dinner guests, lovers and fools. Yet beneath the beauty is something more complicated: longing, failure, violence, boredom, desire and the possibility that repetition might be one of the most accurate ways of describing human existence.
Ragnar Kjartansson: Mercy, currently at the National Gallery of Victoria, is the Icelandic artist’s first major exhibition in Australia. Bringing together eight new and recent video works, it traces the breadth of a practice that moves between film, painting, performance, music and theatre.
Seeing the work in person is important. On a screen, Kjartansson’s films can appear cinematic; in the gallery, they become almost painterly. The compositions are carefully constructed, colour and light are exquisitely controlled, and the performers occupy their frames like figures in historical paintings. The effect is not accidental. Kjartansson studied painting before turning towards moving image, and he traces part of that transition to the influence of British artist Gillian Wearing.
“I was really impressed by Gillian Wearing’s approach to video,” he tells me. As a student in Reykjavík, he was also fortunate enough to assist Wearing, Sarah Lucas, Angus Fairhurst and Michael Landy when they presented Puerile 69 in Iceland. “I just learned so much in that week,” he recalls. “And it gave me so much competence because they were so kind to me. I felt like, okay, I’m in camaraderie with these people.”
What particularly stayed with him was Wearing’s understanding of the camera as something akin to a painter’s eye. “The sense of the camera being the painter’s eye in Gillian Wearing’s work was something that I started working with as a painter. And that has followed me since.”
It is an idea that seems fundamental to Mercy. Kjartansson’s films are not simply films. They are carefully composed images that happen to move, or perhaps paintings that have been given time.
Time is crucial. So is repetition. The NGV describes duration and repetition as key elements through which Kjartansson’s works reveal “rehearsed truths” and unexpected candour. For Kjartansson, however, repetition is not merely a formal device. It is a way of stripping away narrative.
“I really liked working with duration because it just takes the narrative out of things,” he says. “And things just become painterly or sculptural with repetition.
The result is paradoxical. The longer an action continues, the less important the action itself can become. A narrative begins to dissolve and something more elemental emerges: rhythm, gesture, exhaustion, ritual. “It becomes very much more ritualistic,” he explains, comparing the experience to religious rituals such as saying the rosary.
Image credit: Ragnar Kjartansson, Mercy, 2004, Single-channel video with sound Duration: 62:30 minutes © Ragnar Kjartansson; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik
This helps explain the peculiar emotional register of works such as A Lot of Sorrow, the six-hour collaboration with The National in which the band performs the same song continuously. It is an absurd proposition until it becomes something else entirely: an endurance test, a meditation, a concert stripped of its conventional economy of beginning and end. Kjartansson’s answer when I ask how he settled on six hours is characteristically straightforward: “It just had to be long.”
There is a similar tension between sincerity and absurdity throughout Mercy. Kjartansson’s work is frequently hilarious, but the humour does not undermine its seriousness. If anything, it allows him to approach difficult subjects without resorting to solemnity.
Two ideas have stayed with him. One comes from Montesquieu: “seriousness is the shield of stupidity.” The other is from Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness: “nothing is beautiful unless it’s serious.”
“It has to be both,” Kjartansson says. “Which I think is almost like how life is in itself. You need humour to cope.”
The observation seems particularly pertinent now. During our conversation, he mentions having recently been in New York and describes the political and social situation there as “dire”. Then he notices something unexpected. “The people are funnier than they used to be.”
It is a good observation, and an important key to his work. Comedy does not necessarily arrive in opposition to tragedy. Sometimes it is produced by it. “Suddenly when things are dire, then comedy, then the humour really starts kicking out,” he says.
Kjartansson’s particular brand of humour is inseparable from his fascination with beauty. This is where Rococo enters the picture.
For both of us, the subject provokes a certain recognition. As an art-history student, I remember being interested in Rococo at precisely the moment when it was not especially fashionable to be interested in it. The great historical narrative privileged the Renaissance and Baroque; Rococo was somehow decorative, excessive, unserious. Kjartansson has similarly been drawn to its theatricality and decadence, but he has also become increasingly aware of the violence beneath its surface.
“I saw a Fragonard painting exhibition in Paris,” he says, “but I did not realise how fucking violent it is always. There’s so many paintings of rape in it.”
That contradiction—beauty concealing violence—is central to his understanding of the Rococo. The elaborate clothes, languid bodies, pastoral settings and erotic games can appear frivolous until their power structures become visible. “I’m very interested in that,” he says.
“Probably it comes from the fact that I’ve always been drawn to in-your-face, violent works, so I feel like there is violence in everything. I just don’t need to put it in your face. You can sense it anyway.”
In Mercy, this understanding of Rococo is not simply a historical reference. It becomes a method. The exhibition’s seductive surfaces, elaborate compositions and theatrical gestures are accompanied by an awareness of what beauty can conceal. The NGV itself identifies Kjartansson’s various personae—including the Rococo dinner guest—as part of his celebration and satire of the romanticised figure of the artist.
Image credit: Ragnar Kjartansson, Margrét Bjarnadóttir, Bryce Dessner, No Tomorrow, 2022, Six-channel video installation with sound Duration: 29:18 minutes Commissioned by Sigurður Gísli Pálmason, based on a commission by the Iceland Dance Company © Ragnar Kjartansson, Margrét Bjarnadóttir, Bryce Dessner; Courtesy of the artists, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.
The references are unusually broad. Kjartansson speaks about Watteau, Fragonard, Vivant Denon, Sappho and the feminist art movement in the same conversation. His fascination with Denon’s No Tomorrow is particularly revealing. He quotes one line from the eighteenth-century novella: “I looked hard for the meaning of this whole adventure and found none.”
“Heartbreaking,” I suggest.
“So heartbreaking,” he agrees.
This collision of the historical and contemporary is characteristic of Kjartansson’s practice. The artist is not attempting to reconstruct the past so much as to allow different cultural histories to contaminate one another. Rococo painting, feminist performance art, rock music, romantic ballads, cinema and contemporary video can coexist within the same work. The NGV describes his broader practice as drawing on literature, cinema, pop music and Western artistic traditions, while simultaneously subjecting them to an adoring and satirical treatment.
His relationship to music is equally interesting. Kjartansson was in a band as a teenager, but he does not describe himself as a naturally musical child. Instead, he remembers receiving a guitar and leather jacket from his brother-in-law, a rockabilly musician in Iceland, when he was about 13.
“I was always with guitar in the evening,” he recalls.
“Studying the posture and the shadow on the wall,” I suggest.
“Yes. I was just posing with that guitar, not playing it.”
The image is quintessentially Kjartansson: the performance of being a musician before actually becoming one. The pose precedes the substance. The costume creates the persona. The image generates the reality.
This is perhaps why his work is so interested in the gap between performance and authenticity. His performers sing, play, pose, repeat and enact. But the longer they do so, the more the artifice becomes visible—and paradoxically, the more genuine the emotion can feel.
One of the most compelling examples is The Visitors, the nine-screen installation from 2012, which the NGV includes in Mercy. Each musician appears in a different room of Rokeby, an historic mansion in upstate New York, performing as part of a fragmented ensemble. The musicians are physically separated yet musically connected, producing an image of intimacy that is both deeply romantic and knowingly constructed.
Image credit: Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, 2012, Nine-channel video with sound Duration: 64 minutes, Commissioned by the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich © Ragnar Kjartansson; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik. Photos: Elísabet Davids.
Kjartansson’s interest in scale operates similarly. Some works are deliberately intimate, while others require a monumental presentation. “I love to play around scale,” he says. But eventually the work tells him what it needs. A group of works might function best together as a “suite of paintings”, while another loses its power if it is too small.
“Some of them I had shown much smaller,” he explains, “but then it has no power. The power comes from showing it big.”
There is, again, something fundamentally painterly about this statement. Scale is not merely a technical consideration; it alters the psychological relationship between viewer and image.
And then there is the body. Kjartansson’s work can be extraordinarily tender, but it can also be uncomfortable. In one conversation about the exhibition, he admits that even making some of the work has had a physical effect on him. “Sometimes it’s hard to swallow for me and I get choked up,” he says. During one particularly stressful shoot, he recalls being unable to swallow properly for several days.
It seems an appropriate physical response to an artist whose work is so often about the difficulty of swallowing—emotionally, psychologically, historically. We watch people repeat themselves until the gesture becomes ridiculous, then beautiful, then painful. We laugh, and then realise we are watching something that is not funny at all.
That is perhaps the strange mercy of Kjartansson’s work. He allows seriousness and comedy to occupy the same space without resolving the tension between them. Beauty does not cancel violence; humour does not cancel sorrow; repetition does not necessarily produce understanding. Instead, these things accumulate.
“I think my art is like that,” he says. “You need humour to cope.”
At the NGV, the coping mechanism is elaborate: eight films, multiple screens, music, performance, painting, Rococo, romanticism, absurdity and hours of repetition. It is a lot to ask of an audience. But then Kjartansson has never seemed particularly interested in making things easy.
And perhaps that is the point. Stay long enough with the image and the joke becomes melancholy. Stay longer still and the melancholy becomes funny again. The work keeps turning, like a record that refuses to reach its final track.
Ragnar Kjartansson: Mercy is at NGV International, Melbourne, until 4 October 2026.
