Materials

Mihkel Ilus gathering flax. Photograph: Siim Preiman

 

Mihkel Ilus and Paul Kuimet are primarily connected with painting and photography through both their education and their approach to art and the materials they use. Although Ilus’ works in recent years rarely resemble conventional paintings, they are still made from the traditional materials associated with painting: wood, linen canvas and oil paints. The process of synthesising the primary components of painting culminated last summer when Ilus grew flax and dried it in his studio over the winter to use it as a material in this exhibition.

There are both aesthetic and conceptual considerations behind how Kuimet likes to present his works by means of analogue technology. For example, at his 2018 solo exhibition Five Volumes, he exhibited a series of slides called Untitled Transparencies, which depicted windows nailed up with wooden boards. In a way, the framed slides themselves also served as windows letting light in through the projector, and for a moment the work revived the function of the captured windows. A slide projector is thus not a presentation tool, but an essential part of the installation. A similar game with the transparency of glass and film can be witnessed in Kuimet’s film Material Aspects. Light from the projector passes through images of glass facades, which we cannot see through with the naked eye.