Elīna Vītola

The Line at The Moon Bends Back group show at SIC in Helsinki, Finland.

-The Line – fig. I, fig. II and fig. III is a company of three long oil paintings, tangled in their first configuration. 

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At the end of last summer, we met with Inga to imagine an exhibition on painting. This was a task most intriguing for artists such as ourselves, who work with painting and have lots of love for it. Suppose how we began was how we would begin thinking/making something painting-like: intuitively, connecting things that feel like they connect. Often, these connections can be unravelled and explained in detail, but just as often, they are magical or destined.
Something we didn’t look for but found anyway - round shapes of interconnectedness.

Bird eggs emerging from down below, lace of roots and a nest, of whom? Bees have gathered for a big decision. This place is marked to.

Listen to it from your stomach, and a moment opens through breathing; everything else is ancient: amber, cranberry and sand.

The Moon Bends Back brings together the work of four artists who approach painting from its muddy, strange, dreamy and wondrous corners. While they explore the material and spatial aspects of it, they also reach towards the invisible, inviting us to enter a secret world.

Elīna Vītola creates surroundings and then occupies them with gestures of painting. Her language is that of a tireless explorer who seeks to expand the edges of painting—the craft is both an affair and a burden. Abstract, collaborative, rational, and irrational, her work appears in the colour of clay, draped in the texture of mature uncertainty.

Victor Gogly’s works question the relationship humanity maintains with the soil and living things. With associations to undisclosed language, mimicking the texture of turf, the fragrance of a drenched pail of shrubs, oil and rust, his work employs a variety of materials such as paint, roots, clay, metal and beeswax. Thin as membranes, the outlines of human bodies are curved and extended, milky blurred.

Perhaps Victor and Ieva Putniņa are sharing the same grounds: the wetlands, subconscious undergrounds. Ieva’s beings appear tangible, dream-like, uncanny and inclusive, with attention to detail and emotion. They are lovable or noted indifferent–most likely not. Post-dramatic and filled with drama, lazy dreaming, and a preoccupied mind. They are fluid and gender-free, curious and self-sufficient. Taking the role of observer, you are observed.

Pamela Brandt’s images reach outside the visible reality, and the familiar objects transform into something more than meets the eye. Layers of meaning reveal themselves slowly while waiting. The artist is cropping, zooming in, mixing, tearing down, overlapping, rebuilding, and filling. Piercing inner light through it all, playfulness, and a whispered giggle echoing. Inside-out, time counts backwards.

*The exhibition title, “The Moon Bends Back”, is from a poem by Ariana Reines.

Text by Inga Meldere and Aino Lintunen

2024

Curated by Inga Meldere and Aino Lintunen

Photography - SIC