I hold my mobile phone up in front of the QR‐code reader at the airport. It finds my booking in an instant, I get a professional smile from the flight attendant, and am ushered onto the plane. That’s how most things work these days; passwords, digital keys, access cards. We accept having to carry them with us and use information that we cannot interpret ourselves, which cannot be translated using eye and image, language and script. 

We might describe Gardar Eide Einarsson’s art as a series of translations. Fragments and forms from the Internet, sticky labels, fanzines, graffiti and art‐historical icons become signs and messages on canvas or directly on the wall, rendered in paint or ordinary felt‐tip pen. Sculptures that look like ready‐mades – traffic icons, subway anti‐suicide mirrors, neon signs – but which on closer inspection turn out to be carefully produced slices of urban reality. 

But a translation usually involves an interpretation and a dream of readability. That dream is consistently absent from Gardar Eide Einarsson’s art, which is instead characterized by a radical, captivating visual spareness. The works refuse to reveal their sources. Instead of volubly telling us too much about themselves, they give viewers no more than cryptic morsels, tantalizing insinuations and puzzling exclamation marks. 

In parallel with the way digital codes are encrypted and recoded, it can be even more relevant to talk about transpositions. Since what GEE (his name has become a tag!) does is to shift the signs and shapes, or parts of them, between different contexts; from street to art, Internet to art, bureaucracy to art, art to art. This transposition creates a visual rootlessness that, together with the artist’s refusal to give us ‘the big picture’, charges the works with a cocky muteness. We know that they are saying something, but we cannot work out what. Like the QR‐code in my mobile phone it is a message that has to be decrypted. 

From an art‐historical perspective, visual art’s borrowings from mass culture have been coupled with a conception of art as a flight of steps of increasing refinement and stylistic perfection, which behaves in the opposite way to primal, raw energy. This hierarchy is absolutely absent from GEE’s art. His work is borne up by our time’s consciousness that art exists in an intimate exchange with other sophisticated sign systems, in which the crucial thing is not where we are, but the overall feeling for style. GEE’s art is an energy system, in which the exchanges and borrowings go in all directions. Along with everything else, it bears witness to art’s cannibalism; to the way art manages to swallow up and merge with everything from political radicalism to skateboard culture. 

Paranoia as a social condition is a pervasive idea in GEE’s works. Likewise the fascination with the outsider, either grandiose or everyday, who exists on the outside and in conflict with the system’s norms through bombs, or simply through an acrimonious sticker on a car bumper. His works centre on those who do not want to, or cannot, conform, who create alternative systems on the side. Terrorists, clan members and drug barons get their moment in the spotlight, but also various emblems of the maintenance of order – police badges, prison furniture, traffic cones. 

GEE’s art is consistently black‐and‐white. The graphics blatantly play with the clichés of street culture and the ‘underground’, evoking nostalgic associations with printed media, photostated fanzines, black‐and‐white photographs, placards and printed pages from books. The blackness also contains references to all those black monochromes of art history, to the negation of meaning and readability. As a consequence of being black‐and‐white, all the messages acquire an equal weight – all the works seem to draw on the same urban comic‐book reality. 

The landscape through which GEE travels is an identifiable USA in the aftermath of September 11. But it is more of an image of the USA filtered through global mass culture than a real topography, even if it is in New York that Gardar Eide Einarsson principally works. His flat, black‐and‐white cityscape is a reality that could belong anywhere and nowhere. 

The laidback, cool elegance that marks Gardar Eide Einarsson’s art assumes both outsiderness and consensus. Contemporary art wants to have an experienced, informed relationship with mass culture. The art world nods in agreement, even if it does not know the code. Thus, life is built up out of different layers of information laid on top of each other. Sometimes, the strata are worn away and the signs, shapes, messages leak through. We are no longer participants in a single, common culture, but are travelling through many cultures, like immigrants in something we call home. The converse of the multiplicity of the universe, in which everyone knows something, but nobody knows everything, is the paranoia and the conspiracy that seem to be the emblem of our time par excellence. Gardar Eide Einarsson’s art gets its sustenance from a society in which all information is constantly accessible, but readable only by a few. A place in which competing conceptions of the world co‐exist and are in conflict with each other. In which a hierarchy of knowledge has been replaced by different, yet equal types of information. In which every explanation seems to serve to conceal another, which may well turn out to be a lie. 

– Sara Arrhenius