JAAN ELKEN WHITE / HEAVEN AND EARTH 2

Jaan Elken first gained recognition as a hyperrealist, later moving in his artistic practice toward abstractionism and engaging with questions of European cultural and place memory. An essential element of the artist’s work is the absence of fixed components; instead, he plays with fragments of urban landscapes and thoughts that focus on personal experience rather than hyperrealistic photogenicity.

Jaan Elken’s abstractions, simultaneously intellectual and perceptual, have become firmly embedded in our artistic reality, opening through each of the artist’s solo exhibitions profound experiential dimensions of both interior and exterior space. Elken’s artistic expressions are experiential anticipations, observational events where the intensely personal and the deeply existential intertwine into a single visual enigma—a sensation of the immeasurable in the harmonious totality of various sets of signs. Words, lines of text, fragments of color and painting, textures, proximities and distances—like life itself, where fact and its relativity coexist, and where what is seen in reality may later be interpreted internally, its artistic manifestation creating an entirely new reality.

Jaan Elken says: “Everything I experience in life transforms into art.”

Thus, his life and art exist in an unbroken connection, each nourishing the purpose and value of the other. Elken’s paintings equally illustrate his everyday states as well as dreamlike hallucinations and memories, amplifying the intensity of the experienced.

“I have painted works for this exhibition over approximately ten years, with a focus on creations from the past 2–3 years. Hours spent in the studio often appear devoid of events, resembling the loss of freedom imposed on criminals. All the more dynamic is the material seen in dreams, which seems to compensate for the ascetic experience. Paint mixtures are made from salts of heavy metals such as cobalt, lead, cadmium, and strontium, which, once deposited in the bones, perform their dirty work, and as a result, dreams slept in the studio sometimes resemble monster balls. In dreams (and in painting), I can travel freely, even experience interplanetary space; there I dive, surf, and sink—there eternity belongs to me.”

The conceptual motif of the exhibition WHITE / HEAVEN AND EARTH 2 is the approach, convergence, and distancing of sky and earth. The key color is a deep yet sparse white, which has long been a painterly challenge for Elken. As early as 2012, his first white so-called “mattresses” were exhibited at Tallinn City Gallery, taking their conditional name from striped visual motifs. That early “white” referenced Christianity and injustice in a broader sense, and, more narrowly, a biographical detail: Jaan Elken was born in Siberia, Krasnoyarsk Krai, to a deported family. A photograph taken by his father of three-year-old Jaan sitting on a bed against a lime-washed, textured log wall may have been recorded in the subconscious as a vision of the future, inspiring the artist’s later white paintings and his desire to cleanse artificial spaces of paint pollution, guiding viewers to a subtler inner reflection through a highly minimalist color impulse.

In Elken’s contemporary compositions of sky, earth, and white, one finds a series of painted spaces, some situated here, others beyond the limits of reality, generating new meaningful syntheses from the chaos of the artist’s thought fragments. Remaining faithful to an abstract, impasto painting style over many years, Elken’s work remains unmistakably his own, as if in endless self-repetition, yet each painting is entirely unique, like a haiku, where the same

Jaan Elken first gained recognition as a hyperrealist, later moving toward abstraction in his work and engaging with questions of European cultural and place memory. An inherent aspect of the artist’s practice is the absence of fixed ingredients; instead, he plays with fragments of nature, urban landscapes, and thoughts centred on personal experience. Jaan Elken’s contemporary oeuvre is a poetisation of the world’s presence through a powerful and abstract painting aesthetic, and he has now become one of the most significant representatives of abstraction in Estonian painting.

Jaan Elken has been a member of the Estonian Artists’ Association since 1981, served as chair of the Estonian Painters’ Association from 1995 to 1999, and was president of the Estonian Artists’ Association from 1999 to 2013. In addition, he was professor of painting at the University of Tartu’s Institute of Cultural Research and Fine Arts from 1997 to 2017 (until the closure of the department), and has been emeritus professor in the University of Tartu’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities since 2018.

Text: Piia Ausman