Artishok presents: Painting exhibition Trees are Earth's hands by Maris Palgi

Artishok presents: Painting exhibition Trees are Earth's hands by Maris Palgi Curated by Maarin Ektermann
17.12.08 – 05.01.2009
Hobusepea gallery, Tallinn







Maris Palgi is definitely one of the most unique painters among those graduated from the painting department of the University of Tartu. It can be stated that the classic painting tradition of Pallas School is still strongly present in contemporary Tartu painting – today's paintings have the technical perfection and the half-abstract half-figurative way of depicting (partly even compared to bad painting) as well as the subjects that are dealing with recording individual's subjective experience.
Generally, this is too much of a burden from the past that artists try to get rid of, either choosing to go down the road of pop art (Kursi School) or to create their own mystical worlds (exhibitions of „The Dark Side“). Compared to all that, Maris Palgi's choices to paint landscapes and still lives is surprising, even „wrong“.
Palgi's subjects are, indeed, simple, private and their everydayness has an appalling effect. She is depicting what we all know and is familiar to us but is not usually paid attention to (in art). Bourgeois daily life is flirting with kitsch („Old tree or the hell with the crocheted tablemats“, 2004) and is testing audience's tolerance with its bad taste (appalling „Shining“, 2007). Unlike the traditional way of depicting everyday life, Palgi does not make her work too poetic, instead, she turns on the alienation button. There is no expected pop cool lack of depth nor impersonality - Palgi's painting style expresses classical thoroughness, sensitive palette, elaborate brushwork and intimate stories. Avoiding too simple and globally accepted strategies gives Palgi's works special persuasiveness and makes it difficult to deconstruct and demystify.
The romantic clinging to still lives and empty townscapes, characteristic to Pallas School, comes terribly close through Palgi's paintings and becomes an inconsolable experience – looking out the window, we can see a part of the balcony, muddy-snowy ground, some bare bushes and an inexpressive substation, or an antenna and the edge of a balcony („Substation“ and „Antenna“, 2007). The bleakness and emptiness, characteristic to Estonia, lives on not only in super-aesthetic landscapes á la Eda Lõhmus (when speaking again about Tartu painters), but is watching us everywhere. Palgi's style can be best classified under the movement called New Weird, pushed by realism and triviality run by strange mechanisms. Everyday rhythm of life has its own disturbing and alien inner parallel logic. In this context, queerness is not the dominating eccentricity of a diva but the obsessive inner world of a playing child. Parody yields to emphasized sincerity.
Depicting the so-called „special nothing“ is refined into the new simplicity – telling the little personal narratives becomes the therapy against the social nightmares of role behaviour. Palgi's earlier exhibitions (mostly in co-operation with Kaie Luik) have been analysed mostly from the point of view of being a woman („The feminist school raising in Tartu“) .
At the same time, this classification („Female art“) is restricting its interpretation options, when the only things we see are the toasters, sewing machines and ironing boards as the attributes of telling the story of a female trauma and their nostalgic (self-) irony receives no attention.
The present exhibition „Trees are Earth's hands“ in Hobusepea gallery presents the graduation thesis of Palgi's MA studies and its continuation made specially for this occasion. While going on with Pallas style and searching among the trivial subjects, Palgi is painting a series of trees and tree trunks.
What makes an artist good is the ability to paint trees and hands – this was emphasized when Palgi was in elementary school. Another old saying goes – trees are earth's hands. Thus, Palgi acquired her Master's in painting, fulfilling her childhood beliefs through the difficult way of becoming an artist. All of us know such wisdom that we normally suppress in order to get away from the confining era of childhood and youth. Palgi is camp since she is using the material that most of us wants to forget.

Text by Maarin Ektermann