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Over and Over - Art That Never Stops  

But when the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson invited a reporter to visit him there the other day, he wrote, "See you at the abyss." And what anyone who stops by his work space at the palazzo will find, now or over the next six months, is a farcically romantic idea of what the end of the world might look like, at least for an artist: Mr. Kjartansson, standing at an easel day after day, relentlessly painting the portrait of a man who poses before him in a black Speedo, cigarette and beer in hand.

As time passes, the canvases Mr. Kjartansson makes -- he plans to complete one a day -- will mount up around him, as will the empty bottles and butt-filled ashtrays, all of it a monument to artistic ruin. . . .

Last year in a performance that could be seen as a warm-up for Venice, he assumed all the clichéd trappings of a plein-air painter, sitting on a hillside in upstate New York with an easel, smoking cigars and reading “Lolita” while he worked. . . .

"I think, secretly, it's what every artist wants to do, just to sit and paint and smoke and think," he said.

On Tuesday afternoon Mr. Bjornsson was doing most of the smoking, a steady stream of Benson & Hedges

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