Curatorial Introduction

If you want to know, everything’s going to be cleared, all these rocks, cottages… Instead buildings of dazzling beauty will rise from transparent and semi-transparent materials, stadia, swimming-pools, aerial parks, crystal bars, and cafes. Stairways to the sky! Slender, swaying women with dark supple skin! Libraries! Muscles! Laboratories! Penetrated by sun and light! A free timetable! Cars, gliders, airships … debates, hypnopaedia, stereo-cinema…

Secretary’s assistant Vanderbilt in “The Snail on the Slope” by the Brothers Strugatsky

The exhibition “Endless Story” takes place at the intersection of the expanded fields of painting and photography, represented by painter Mihkel Ilus and photographer Paul Kuimet. In his work of recent years, Ilus has primarily focused on dissecting and questioning the art of painting as such. In Kuimet’s work, architecture plays an important role as the object of documentation as well as architectonic structures erected in the exhibition space.

On a superficial level, the two artists may not have much in common at first glance. However, their work is united by their dedication to the material and their creative intensity, which is most clearly expressed in their fanaticism for their chosen media and techniques. The fields of painting and photography both endow their practitioners with numerous guidelines for the correct ways of behaviour and choice of material. For the painter, let the canvas be linen and the paint be oil. Analogue photographs are not retouched in Photoshop, but by skilful manipulation of light in the darkroom. And so, we mainly see traditional materials used in the art of painting in Ilus’ works: oil paint, linen canvas and untreated wood. Kuimet, from his side, consistently applies traditional forms of photography: slides, film and analogue enlargements.

In our age of irreversible globalisation, with many fields converging, blending and conforming, talking about the separate fields of painting or photography may seem conservative. The field of visual art is also increasingly blurred rather than clearly categorised, with artists combining methods from a wide range of different traditions. Everyone is at the same time a master and an apprentice, and technical skills in the handling of material are just as valuable as ignorant enthusiasm. Ilus and Kuimet’s visual purism may seem exceptional in this context. In reality, they both also use technologies that were not available to their predecessors. Ilus delegates most of his folds and cuts to machines, while Kuimet’s work process frequently involves a digital phase.

In this exhibition, Ilus and Kuimet look at the invisible systems that drive our world, the former addressing local systems, the latter global ones, which despite the passing of time, remain or are reborn in an almost unchanged form. However, the exhibition is significant in terms of their independent artistic methods, as they both operate in territories new to them. Paul Kuimet has for many years captured modernist architecture, including glass buildings in International Style that are found in nearly every city in the world. In this exhibition, he is showing us how London’s Crystal Palace, built in the 1850s, became an archetype of the official architecture of global capitalism through copying and distortion. After many years of playful deconstruction of painting, Mihkel Ilus has reached the point where he can use his developed visual language to tell stories outside the world of painting. He displays human-sized men-easels in different situations, referring to the political and work culture in Estonia, dreams before independence and important moments in reality after regaining independence, as well as autobiographical circumstances.

In Ben Lerner’s novel “10:04” an unusually strong cyclone is approaching New York. Residents have been evacuated from lower districts. The rest are instructed to prepare for power outages and to gather water, food and other supplies. Collecting supplies in the supermarket, the first-person narrator of the book describes how his awareness of the approaching storm and his image of a possible future affects the way he experiences the present. Items on store shelves begin to glow, and he very clearly starts to understand the systems behind them.

It is a long series of events that has brought us to our present globalised world, and it is difficult to determine where it all started. Ilus and Kuimet’s duo exhibition covers a very short period in this endless story, roughly the most recent 170 years. Their works hopefully shed light on past events, bringing forward the flickering contours of the present and opening the door to new conceptions of the future.