Beautiful Evening

During the 1980s Subbi created several paintings that develop notions of abstraction and the body. For the first time he created canvases such as Bright Evening (Särav õhtu, 1987) or Cool Light (Jahe valgus, 1988) in which abstraction fully takes over the representation of architecture, space and landscape. Beautiful Evening was made at the same time and brings these elements together in a single composition with a nude. The nude, still and totemic, stands out from the landscape through her lack of colour, illustrated instead with the vibrancy of white and light blue shadow. The titles of Subbi’s paintings often add significance to his paintings. In this one as well as the other nudes painted in this decade, the title describes the surroundings and never the person, for instance: The Mountains and the Clouds (Mäed ja pilved, 1986), The Woods Far Away (Kauged metsad, 1988), and The Evening Fields (Õhtused põllud, 1988). One bears a striking difference – The Monument (Monument, 1992) named after a standing nude, the female body in white and light blue shadow stands on a plinth surrounded by an abstract landscape. The figure of a woman is not a meditation on portraiture, but one on sculpture and representation following the ideals of beauty in classical art. Just as Subbi’s landscapes represent an unreachable beauty and harmony of the world, his painted nudes are a representation of unattainable human perfection, beauty and the spirit of the world.