I am a contemporary painter working between Tallinn and Berlin. Color is both the material and the subject of my work – what color can do directly, when it isn't being asked to depict or illustrate something else.
I'm interested in painting that asks to be looked at slowly, in time when images move past us faster than we can take them in. Painting operates at a different speed. It needs sustained looking, and what surfaces tends to come from the viewer as much as from the work itself.
Most images around us are built to push their own content into our attention. Slow looking works the other way – it gives the viewer's own material room to register. What the work becomes is partly what the viewer brings to it. That kind of attention has been getting rare. My works are built to keep it available. They open gradually and give back something different each time.
This series starts with PVC banners I find in the street: commercial signs and event advertisements, large surfaces designed to be seen from a distance and forgotten the moment they stop being relevant.
What gets painted over is not erased. The original image stays in the work, often more than the finished piece reveals at first glance. Fragments from the underlying print continue to operate beneath the paint, sometimes legibly, sometimes only as an undertone. The two surfaces, the industrial print and the painting on top, end up locked into each other.
I'm interested in what this kind of half-buried image does to perception. The brain encounters something partially visible and starts working – filling in what's missing, constructing meaning out of what isn't fully there. This is something we do constantly and rarely notice. Here it becomes the subject of the work. The moment viewer catches themselves constructing a form or a narrative from partial cues, their own perceptual machinery becomes visible. Not the image, but the act of seeing itself.
Pattern recognition is the same operation now being performed at scale by artificial intelligence. The intuitive and imperfect human process of finding meaning in fragments is becoming a global automated system, and where that system is heading is closer to science fiction than science. We are inside a scenario that would have been speculative fiction not long ago: a race toward something that promises either the disappearance of suffering at scale or the end of the species that built the technology. Which way it goes depends on human qualities that don't automate well – the kind of attention that can fold back on itself and notice, from inside, how a mind is operating.
That kind of self-aware attention is what these works are built around. They create a situation where slowing down becomes possible. In that deceleration there is something no algorithm replicates.
The material here is poster matter pulled off public surfaces — accumulated layers from city walls where things have been pasted, weathered, torn, and pasted over again. What does the work is color in the raw form it arrived in, mass-produced and now stripped of whatever it was for.
Each poster layer once carried someone's intention: to invite, inform, persuade. The title points to these impulses. Through collection and recomposition, individual messages dissolve into illegibility. What remains are color fragments that no longer serve any advertisement or announcement but form a new whole of their own. The calls have gone yet the wanting still runs strong.
These works function as cross-sections of a specific environment's visual language. I use posters from the recent past: the print tones, graphic rhythms, and material textures reflect the time and place where they were sourced. A work composed from one city's poster layers reads differently from one built from another's, not through any intentional reference but because each location produces its own raw visual vocabulary.
These dense, layered color fields work as material metaphors for collective memory. Every layer is evidence of someone trying to reach other people. That impulse is close to what defines us as a species and what has carried us this far. Here it has been compressed into surfaces where intentions merge into a shared unconscious.
What the work makes visible is collective drive. The push behind every poster is the same one that built language and keeps people inventing things. Each layer in the work is a moment when that drive was passing through someone.
From across the room these paintings look like quiet monochromatic rectangles. The frameless presentation gives the impression that the color fields extend beyond the rigid geometry that contains them.
Move closer and the quietness breaks apart. What looked uniform is many overlapping layers of paint, each made with a different set of marks. The density is enormous. What seemed still is in fact full of movement. A single painting can look like two different works depending on whether you're standing three meters away or thirty centimeters.
In that gap between distances, something that seemed obvious reveals itself as layered and complex once given time. The analogy extends beyond painting: assumptions flatten what patience would deepen.
Color alone fills these surfaces. Meaning forms from within the viewer, drawn up by color from wherever their life experience has taken them. In this sense the painting is always about the person standing in front of it. Color operates here as a sensory technology, met in the body before it reaches the mind.
The investigation has expanded from individual paintings into immersive installations where color, projected light, and low-frequency sound fill a room. In these environments, two color systems merge: the subtractive color of paint on surfaces and the additive color of digital projection, slowly animated and shifting. The primal bodily act of painting meets its technological counterpart. In both forms, the work waits for the viewer to slow down to meet it.