BANGS AND GAPS

Sirje Petersen’s paintings create perceptual rhythms throughout the two-storey halls of Haus Gallery. The abstractions of figures and landscapes shape tones of feeling and states of being rather than positions or statements.

The artist’s pictorial fields are psychologically charged, drawing the viewer into a compellingly tense space that captivates not only through its intriguing compositional solutions and dynamic figures reaching out from the canvas surface to engage with the world, but also through its powerfully conceived content.

Sirje Petersen’s subject is the impulses and voids of the world more broadly – not individual impulses that make us move or pause, but larger acts of looking inward and outward, of experiencing – movements and stillnesses traceable as processes, breaths and inhalations. It is precisely this psychological dialogue between inner and outer worlds that the artist depicts against the existential backdrop of her paintings. She paints invisible conversations into visibility.

In the exhibition space, Sirje Petersen’s powerful large formats alternate with miniatures, turning the display into something like a performance, whose temporal rhythms draw the viewer in, culminate, settle, and excite.

The artist writes about her exhibition:
“Impulses are moments of force — currents that pass through the body and leave a temporary trace within it. Voids are interruptions where continuity does not take hold: places where form disintegrates, does not persist, falls in between. The figures here do not exist; they occur, being in constant transformation — in bending, in shifting, in negotiation with gravity. Every movement is simultaneously both creation and dissolution. Movement towards something does not mean resolution but a process, recurring interruptions and new beginnings. My exhibition speaks of the mobility of life along the line of driving impulses and interruptions.”

Thus, Sirje Petersen’s paintings are intense visuals that do not form through the coverage of colour but through its fluidity. The sensed and the recognisable exist in tones that gather emotions and at the same time allow them to dissolve at the threshold of abstraction, opening spaces for the viewer where meanings are neither fixed nor limited, where the synergy of forms and patches of colour absorbs us and releases us simultaneously. Sirje Petersen’s works do not tell a story, but invite the viewer to participate in their own presence, here and now, where everything emerges and disappears, only to emerge again and disappear again…

Text: Piia Ausman