Bergur Thorberg’s art has developed in steps that, with hindsight, seem perfectly logical, revealing his personal journey beyond the styles and methods that come and go as fashions change. His art has been sometimes in-fashion, sometimes out, and it seems to him a matter of indifference whether his currents carry him alongside the mainstream or away from it. His ideas mature slowly and gradually achieve a streamlined simplicity that leaves plenty of room for interpretation but no room for misunderstanding.

While his images have sometimes been striking, even aggressive, his ardour is tempered by an appreciation of simpler styles of life. In his café series, Bergur has nurtured this approach for almost a decade and a half, bringing to life tableaux that breathe of relaxed and intimate moments, the simple pleasures of companionship enjoyed over a cup of coffee. In a modest tradition that encompasses the literary cafés of nineteenth-century Paris and Lisbon but is shared in every anonymous roadside coffeehouse, this meeting of public and private life crystallises and resolves the contradictions of our various personae: An intimate contact shared on a crowded square or at an anonymous counter in a terminal. Painting these images with coffee is much more than a clever twist, a conceptual cliché. It captures the contemplative moment perfectly, the simple but sophisticated pleasure of the café and the self-contained world of friends or lovers sitting with their cups a corner table, freed for awhile from the bustle of the streets. The dark-brown lines and pale shapes of the pictures, drawn and filled in with coffee, allow us to dwell on the moment without worrying about the outside world or the problems of our own lives: The contradictions are suspended and what is revealed instead is a purely human pleasure, an aesthetic celebration of simplicity.

Bergur Thorberg applies his method in even more striking ways in the recent series of paintings he names collectively with the letter M. The product of many years of research, these paintings once again show the artist grappling with opposites, with what would seem to be irresolvable contradictions and finding a solution that is both simple and elegant, without trivialising his subject. Landscape and the fluctuations of the market; measurements that fix reality contrasted with the ever-changing outlines of nature itself; abstraction and the immediacy of the natural world. These are large-scale questions, the kind that constitute the very limits of our world where we live out our lives in a tense compromise which holds out no promise of a final resolution. The solution, again, is found in a pared-down aesthetic and the fortuitous structural merging of opposites on the canvas.

Jón Proppé, art critic and curator

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