Expanse of the sky

During the year before the exhibition, Kristi Kongi painted 33 small paintings of views from her studio window. Some months she painted more works, some months less, and for some reason missed the month of May altogether. Although fragmented, these works make up a kind of calendar that captures the change in the colour of the sky over the course of a year. It would remain fragmented even with the best of intentions, because the sky does not change in months or days, but in seconds.

The painting installation Colour is the Fiction of Light is the one place in this exhibition where Kongi, typically of her, has been able to occupy almost an entire room with her painting. As already mentioned, she is moving back from extreme abstraction toward representation. Looking for points of encounter or full circles she has made on this journey, I remember her installation in the exhibition Can’t Go On, Must Go On at the Art Hall at the end of 2014, which had also grown out of her studio experience. Back then, her studio was not located in the Art Hall building, but now she works directly above this exhibition space. Looking out of the window here, we can see the same view depicted in the paintings on the wall. These works perhaps most clearly reflect the impressionist play of inclusion and exclusion in terms of both colour and framing. Aren’t these the buildings of the Old Town and the frames and sills of the of her studio windows surrounding the sky in each painting, reduced to the extreme? And there is another interesting thing about them: the colours are surprisingly soft for Kristi Kongi, perhaps closer than ever to the greyish palette of Krista Mölder, that friend of eternal twilight.