2026 White / Heaven and earth 2

HAUS Gallery | 03.02- 07.03.2026

Jaan Elken says: “Everything I experience in life transforms into art.” Thus, his life and art exist in an unbroken connection, each nourishing the purpose and value of the other. Elken’s paintings equally illustrate his everyday states as well as dreamlike hallucinations and memories, amplifying the intensity of the experienced.

“I have painted works for this exhibition over approximately ten years, with a focus on creations from the past 2–3 years. Hours spent in the studio often appear devoid of events, resembling the loss of freedom imposed on criminals. All the more dynamic is the material seen in dreams, which seems to compensate for the ascetic experience. Paint mixtures are made from salts of heavy metals such as cobalt, lead, cadmium, and strontium, which, once deposited in the bones, perform their dirty work, and as a result, dreams slept in the studio sometimes resemble monster balls. In dreams (and in painting), I can travel freely, even experience interplanetary space; there I dive, surf, and sink—there eternity belongs to me.”

The conceptual motif of the exhibition WHITE / HEAVEN AND EARTH 2 is the approach, convergence, and distancing of sky and earth. The key color is a deep yet sparse white, which has long been a painterly challenge for Elken. As early as 2008, so-called “mattresses” were exhibited at ArtDepoo Contemporary Art Gallery taking their conditional name from striped visual motifs. At his solo exhibition “It has been written” in 2012, at Tallinn City Gallery, were exhibited white paintings where early “white” referenced Christianity and injustice in a broader sense, and, more narrowly, a biographical detail: Jaan Elken was born in Siberia, Krasnoyarsk Krai, to a deported family. A photograph taken by his father of three-year-old Jaan sitting on a bed against a lime-washed, textured log wall may have been recorded in the subconscious as a vision of the future, inspiring the artist’s later white paintings and his desire to cleanse artificial spaces of paint pollution, guiding viewers to a subtler inner reflection through a highly minimalist color impulse.

In Elken’s contemporary compositions of sky, earth, and white, one finds a series of painted spaces, some situated here, others beyond the limits of reality, generating new meaningful syntheses from the chaos of the artist’s thought fragments. Remaining faithful to an abstract, impasto painting style over many years, Elken’s work remains unmistakably his own, as if in endless self-repetition, yet each painting is entirely unique, like a haiku, where the same systemic and conceptual forms, even the same motifs, create new perceptual meanings in new combinations. Elken 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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