"Ragnar Kjartansson Is the Great Romantic Artist for Our Age of Loneliness" by Carlos Valladares

“Reality is a cliché,” wrote Wallace Stevens in 1951, “from which we escape by metaphor.”

There’s almost no better guide today through today’s undrained swamps of clichés, metaphors, and cliché metaphors than Ragnar Kjartansson, the up-and-downbeat pop video artist whose survey, “Ragnar Kjartansson: Politics of the Obvious,” just opened at the Buffalo AKG. He drives headlong into the cliché and emerges reinvigorated and refreshed. You wonder: Well, what’s his secret?

The Icelandic artist presents six of his performance and installation pieces in Buffalo. With one exception, they each speak, with sweet jest and eloquent irony, to why we hold onto received ideas like they were flotsam in a whirlpool. He takes apart the tradition of uncomplicated mommy love by having his own mom spit on him (Me and My Mother, 2000–25). He literalizes, with a live performance in a tuxedo, the reactionary idea that masculinity as we know it is, gasp, in peril (Bangemand/Scaredman, 2023). And he sends up idyllic romance among the rich (Scenes from Western Culture: The Boat, 2015) with less TV-bred flab and distraction than White Lotus.

Read full article at artnews.com/art-in-america.