Time Sensitive

IT’S FRIDAY NIGHT during the opening weekend of the Icelandic arts festival Sequences, and I’m at a food hall in Reykjavik along with a dozen or so members of the tight-knit creative scene on this island of roughly 360,000 people. One of the show’s cocurators, the sixty-three-year-old artist Ingólfur Arnarsson, is expressing his love for the experimental black-metal band Liturgy, as well as the intense, clavicle-rattling ambient noise of Tim Hecker. I’m surprised, a little, that Arnarsson’s musical tastes veer so aggressive; he’s a fairly subdued guy, known for making modest pencil-on-paper

diary September 09, 2019

Playful Slash Erotic

IT BEGINS IN UTTER BLACKNESS. A Pierre Soulages kind of blackness, that is, uptown at Lévy Gorvy, where the nonagenarian French painter is being celebrated in advance of a major to-do at the Louvre later this year. I’m always impressed with, and a little confused by, the stamina of any artist who can find a winning formula and stick to it—Soulages has been making black abstractions exclusively since 1979—without succumbing to some deep boredom or soul-despair. The artist, says senior director Emilio Steinberger during press remarks, “is a bit of a unicorn”—in that he knew just about everyone,