A letter to T (instead of foreword)

Dear T!

We were genuinely delighted to hear about your unexpected trip to Paris. You’ll probably disagree, but I’m convinced that a change of scenery and a little shake-up will do you nothing but good. From here – amid the stale semi-winter of Tartu – the change of environment seems especially wonderful: springtime in Paris, the gardens of the Palais Royal, blooming magnolias, and you, joyfully taking in their delicate fragrance. So when you return, we hope to see you with a refreshed spirit and your head held high.

By the way, speaking of blossoms and blooming.

Lilac has revealed itself. Somehow suddenly and all at once. Unexpectedly clear, coherent, and categorically complete in form – and I’ve been walking around for several days now, bewildered. I keep thinking back to our conversations, how beneficial and necessary it would be to make a light and intimate, simple and comforting exhibition. How important it would be to evoke, through it, a distinctly affirmative imagery – one that reconciles familiar contradictions. Even now, I’m reading from my notes: “… despite everything, regardless of it all, even in defiance of common sense, let this become a beautiful, quiet, radiant, and trusting display in springtime Tallinn. Everything is in place for it. Everything is here. This is exactly the kind of gentle defiance we need right now …”

Indeed, the artists, their works, and the exhibition space resonate beautifully together. A quiet, earnest song – masculine, with a purity as austere as the beauty of Wiiralt’s sculpture.

Amid all these dahlias, asters, and lilacs, Kristjan Teder emerges as whole, full-blooded, and lucid – like an angel in his rediscovered naivety, rejoicing in life rather than suffering through it. This revelation is worth a great deal.

Jass Kaselaan’s Human Head acts as a kind of catalytic mass, an ironic counterpoint that helps ward off false pathos.

In the end, with my involvement, it was supposed to result in a multifaceted and multi-layered image of a human being – necessarily pleasant, and upon closer inspection, even beautiful. But something else emerged. What revealed itself  through Lilac bent me low and pressed me to the ground; it was foreign and dark.

Knowing how deeply you care about this project, I write these words with a heavy heart.

Dear T, I couldn’t do it. I’m very sorry, but this time, neither my desire nor my skills were enough. I couldn’t find the strength of hope within myself to sing the little sparrow’s song, to say something warm and comforting. The wonderful works gathered for the exhibition didn’t help me, nor did Lilac. Like some anti-Midas, everything I touched turned into raw, cold clay. I look around – at all of us, at what we do and say, at what’s happening – and even when I look into my growing son’s eyes, I see that although each of us might deserve compassion and love, as a collective, as a mass, we deserve only oblivion and ruin. We have created a civilisation of murderers and cannibals. The world is in the hands of evil, and there is no hope left in it.

Forgive me, T, I didn’t mean to end this letter so abruptly and irreversibly.

But let it be as it is – because more is yet to come. Hurry back. They say that spring will reach here soon, too.

Always the same,

J