Nothing and other things a like

Haapsalu City Gallery, Haapsalu, Estonia

Sep 5 - Sep 29, 2024

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The starting point of the Haapsalu City Gallery exhibition were three paintings, which were driven directly from the first idea of the exhibition "Abstract hyperreality" (painting a color palette). The small-format (17x17cm) paintings in a photo-realistic style depicted fragments of a color palette. On the sides of the paintings stripes were painted, which resulted from the colors remaining at the edges of the painting and created a situation where, as the author, I did not decide on the shades, widths and density of the stripes, thereby relinquished control over what was depicted. These stripes painted on the sides were photographed and printed out enlarged, then wrinkled and photographed again. Based on the last photos, I painted 3 large-format works (200x140cm), which in turn created new stripes, which allowed repeating the same visual to infinity. I covered the wrinkled prints (made as a byproduct) with EPO resin. A planar elastic material became a stiff three-dimensional abstract object.

 

Playing with the boundaries of photorealism and abstractionism was one of the initial impulses for the first exhibition of the series, "Abstract Hyperreality". The zoomed in surfaces of the color palette turned into abstract paintings on the canvas, which were painted in a hyperrealistic technique. This kind of contradictory approach continues in the later works that derive from these paintings. Only the way of representing abstraction has changed.