2026 Valge / Taevas ja maa 2

HAUS Gallery | 03.02- 07.03.2026

Jaan Elken’s simultaneous intellectual and sensory abstractions have become rooted in our artistic reality, with each of his solo exhibitions opening up deep, contemplative dimensions of inner and outer space. Elken’s artistic manifestations are always experiences-in-waiting, observational events where the highly personal and the deeply existential intertwine into a single visual riddle – a sensation of immeasurability within a harmonious whole of diverse sign-constellations. Words, lines of text, fragments of color and colorlessness, textures, proximities and distances – like life, where fact and its relativity coexist, where what appears in reality later becomes an inner interpretation, whose artistic form constitutes an entirely new reality.

Jaan Elken says: “Everything I experience in life transforms into art.”
Thus, his life and art are in unbroken connection, each feeding the other’s cause and value. Elken’s paintings equally illustrate both his everyday states of being and his dreamlike hallucinations and memories, amplifying the power of what has been experienced.

“I have been painting works for this exhibition over roughly 10 years, with the focus on the creations of the last 2–3 years. The hours spent in the studio are seemingly uneventful, resembling the loss of freedom imposed on criminals. All the more dynamic is the material seen in dreams, as if a compensation for the asceticism I’ve lived through. The color pigments are mixed from heavy metal salts such as cobalt, lead, cadmium and strontium, which, once deposited in the bones, do their dirty deeds; under their influence, the dreams I dream in the studio can at times seem like balls for monsters. In dreams (and in paintings) I can travel freely, experience even interplanetary space; there I dive/surf and drown – there, eternity belongs to me.”

The conceptual framework of the exhibition VALGE / TAEVAS JA MAA 2 is the approaches, convergences and distances between heaven and earth, with the key color being a deep yet sparse white, which has been a painterly challenge for Jaan Elken before. Already in 2012, his first white so‑called “mattresses” were shown at Tallinn City Gallery, gaining their figurative name from their striped visual appearance. That earlier “white” alluded to Christianity and to injustice more broadly, and more specifically to a biographical episode: Jaan Elken was born in Siberia, in Krasnoyarsk Krai, into a family of deportees. A photograph taken by his father of three‑year‑old Jaan sitting on a bed, in front of a log wall whitewashed with lime mortar and rough in texture, may have imprinted itself in his subconscious as a future that later materialized in the emergence of his white paintings and in the desire to cleanse those future artificial spaces of visual noise, inspiring the viewer, through a minimalist color impulse, toward much more refined introspection.

The conjunction of skies, lands, and white in Jaan Elken’s work today is grounded in remembered experience, with the artist drawn to both real and sensory places that, somewhere on this side and beyond the thresholds of perception, generate new syntheses out of chaos through the artist’s fragments of thought. Remaining faithful for many years to an abstract, impasto painting manner, Elken’s work is recognizably his own, as if an endless self-repetition, yet in every painterly manifestation absolutely unique, like a haiku whose same systemic and conceptual forms, even the same motifs, create new perceptual meanings in new combinations. The artist has been captivated by the analysis of these perceptual meanings, as well as by examining works painted in different contexts and shown in different exhibitions in new constellations, in order to discover matrices in compositional devices and recurring patterns in color use, while still marking out something entirely unrepeatable.

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