Árni Rúnar began to exhibit his paintings more than two decades ago. Early on, he developed a highly individual approach which was characterised by the unfettered flow of vibrant colours across the canvas. Sometimes it was as if the paintings were about to explode with colour and the brushstrokes meandered and mingled until the whole painting seemed to writhe with their force. Though these were not landscapes, nature was somehow very much present in his paintings ñ perhaps primarily in the energy they expressed. The painterís battle with his brushes and colours was such that the forces of nature seemed to speak through him. Sometimes this energy was bound in stricter compositions but more often than not flowed across the entire canvas and sometimes the canvas seemed hardly able to contain it so that the painting seemed to be but a part of some much larger picture.

In later years, Árni Rúnar's paintings have developed and changed significantly. The natural world is even more clearly present here than in the earlier paintings but in a very different way. The colour palette is narrower and natural colours dominate. The paintings recreate in surprisingly realistic detail the lichens that grown on the surface of rocks and cliffs in the landscape and which we cannot see clearly until we come very close or even look at the stones through a magnifying glass. The paintings still flow across the entire canvas with little concern for centred composition or dominant forms. His approach is more disciplined and yet a great deal more complicated and accomplished. Instead of allowing the brushstrokes to run about the canvas he now builds his paintings layer by layer, emphasising the texture of the surface and the patterns that emerge in it. He also uses different chemicals and paints to achieve a range of effects so that some forms become almost transparent while others sit opaquely in the foreground and some even develop a wrinkled texture of their own as they dry. Here it is not the unfettered energy and the broad strokes of the landscape that we see but its surface seen up close. These paintings are strangely engaging and it is easy to lose oneself in his large canvases and let ones gaze sink deeper and deeper into the complex, patterned surfaces. The paintings transport the viewer from his normal perspective on the landscape into the microcosm of the rocks surface and the hardy life that flourishes on their wind-blown and frost-cracked surface. There we see the connection between the largest and the smallest features and can wonder at the complexities of the natural world which reflects both structure and chaos wherever we look ñ even in the rocks under our feet.

Jón Próppe.