2024 Landscape

Jaan Elken: “As an artist, I create worlds that aspire to visual integrity, guided by my intellectual coordinates. If you choose a sufficiently high and distant vantage point, details disappear, colors dissolve, and forms melt. If you take away all the details, the horizon remains, the distribution between up and down, the understanding of good and bad, and the great dichotomy of darkness and light. Painting may currently be in its happiest position throughout its multi-thousand-year history. It is free from obligations of representation (since new digital media have taken on these functions), and also free from the burden of modernist formal experiments (since the journey to the “end of the world” and back has already been made). What remains is the freedom to operate in its own universe.

In painting, I have mentally compartmentalized subject matters – water, in light of our current knowledge, is the most important among them. It exists in the sky and on the ground, appearing as water, ice, or steam. Water also gives acrylic paints their fluidity. In the five paintings with three-meter-long sides, there is an atmospheric presence without falling into photorealism or monotonous minimalism. I seek visual equivalents for internal states of mind, against the backdrop of a long-held understanding of consciousness as an inner cosmos.

During my travels to Iceland and Norway, I have experienced a sense of déjà vu, been fascinated by the agony of melting glaciers, and felt a shivering awe towards cliff ledges that seem to exist in my subconscious as archetypes from the dawn of time. 

The works displayed in the exhibition are not abstracted generalizations of existing reality, but rather projections of my consciousness and imagination. The inner power of the motifs is inversely proportional to their formal polish; behind the morbid atmosphere in gray tones, the possibility of a blue sky can be sensed. In my paintings, deliberate intent stands in dramatic opposition to the vigorous brushwork characteristic of abstract expressionism, resulting in energetically charged and impasto painterly matter on the canvases.”

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