21.XI \u2013 10.XII 2017 |\u00a0Vabaduse Gallery, Tallinn, Estonia<\/p>\n
With this exhibition, Jaan Elken continues his so-called \u201copen landscape\u201d series, the beginning of which can be traced back to the exhibition \u201cIt has been written\u201d in Tallinn City Gallery in 2012, and \u201cStrawberry Fields\u201d in Vabaduse Gallery in 2013. His exhibitions have a strong autobiographic element, yet also appealing to a more universal human experience with archetypes of landscapes. The white-gray rainbows remind of things lost or yet to come, a sensation the artist has expressed with the thought \u201cSomewhere over the rainbow, the skies are blue\u201d.<\/p>\n
Jaan Elken describes his new exhibition:<\/p>\n
\u201cIf 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.
\nIn the unwritten hierarchy of arts, music has a very special position, as it talks directly to human soul \u2013 there is certainty and determinism by the creator, yet even the most technically lucid listener is affected by the mood and associations, and all of this remains abstract! A good architect has a similar kind of plan in their work, creating poetry of space for the viewer and showing the value of human existence. Painting is now perhaps in the its happiest place during its existence over several thousand years. It has become free from the obligation to represent (as new media has picked up this function), it is free from the repression of modernist form experimentation (this path to the end of the world and back has already been done). What is left is ultimate freedom to operate in its own universe.
\nIf you remove all objects, the horizon remains, and if you remove the horizon, the canvas remains empty. This feels like ultimate freedom, as if everything is possible\u2026 and yet nothing is possible. Anonymous brush or spatula strokes are mere notes, construction elements, to build something greater, even if the given space is a small gallery.
\nThe contrasts of large 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 if speeding is replaced by transcendental ascension, when you no longer can feel the speed, or space time in an ordinary manner \u2013 emerging above the clouds. \u201c<\/p>\n