JAAN ELKEN. PAINTINGS 2001 \u2013 2024
\nViinistu Art Museum. Barrel Gallery
\n29.06. – 29.07.2024<\/p>\n
Jaan Elken.: As an artist, I create worlds that make claims of visual comprehensiveness, with intellectual coordinates that have guided me in one way or another. I currently work with the architectonics of metaphorical landscapes that are inspired by collapsing glaciers and stone deserts, I even use outer space as a viewpoint. Aesthetics that poeticizes decay and extinction, that observes the intersection between the inside and the outside, provides me with endless opportunities to map the reality according to my own rules. It is rather about searching for visual equivalents to the inner states of mind \u2013 the search being based on the knowledge about consciousness as the so-called inner space acquired throughout the years.<\/em><\/p>\n If you choose a high enough vantage point, details disappear, colours collapse and forms melt together. The only thing that remains is the horizon, a vertical division of up and down, conceptions of good and evil, and the great dichotomy between light and darkness. The contrasts of metropolitan airports, where the human made futuristic emptiness of the terminals is followed by a different emptiness when you hit the runway, where the rush of speeding is replaced by transcendental ascension, when you no longer can feel the speed\/space\/time in an ordinary manner \u2013 emerging above the clouds.<\/em><\/p>\n My retrospective show has a strong thread of autobiographical elements involved, it also appeals to a more universal human experience with archetypes of landscapes. The white-gray-red \u201eStrawberry Fields Forever\u201c(2012) and \u201eMarch 25th, Snowy\u201c(2017) series refer to my early years in Siberia, where I was born in 1954 \u2013 my parents were deported by russians in 1949.<\/em><\/p>\n I try to avoid photorealism characteristic to new age phenomena and monotonous minimalism, but rely on abstract expressionism as a starting point \u2013 but still there are at least two paintings, which combine my earlier hyperrealism with abstract surfaces \u2013 very personal \u201eLinda. Remix 2001\u201c (1980\/2001) and psychedelic \u201eLucy In The Sky With Diamonds\u201c (2001) which refers to the soviet era parallel reality. Thanks to Jaan Manitski, who has obtained \u201eLinda. Remix 2001\u201c to the museum from Bukowski`s auction house in the fall of 2023.<\/em><\/p>\n