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For greater than a decade, artist Ēriks Apaļais has explored the bounds of autobiography. This curiosity within the need to retroactively assemble one’s id by way of narrative steeps his work within the semantics of self-reflection. The exhibition “Mailbox No. 12” provides a constellation of what curator Katerina Gregos has known as “Reminiscence Objects,” floating recollections that conjure the environment and inside workings of the Riga-adjacent Babīte parish, the place the artist lived in the course of the turmoil of the post-Soviet Nineteen Nineties. Reinterpreted at present within the intentionally infantile fashion of fairy tales, the recollections depicted in these work—many connected to constructing snowmen within the yard—mix letters and symbols with extra private parts, together with portraits of the artist, his sister, his mom, his associate, the painter Amanda Ziemele, and his father, who seems within the abstracted type of a juniper department. The feeling produced is one akin to the wrestle to talk whereas nonetheless trying to find a phrase.
Beforehand, Apaļais’s work tended to have a flat, matte floor, usually in a monochrome black or grey tone, upon which linguistic and iconographic parts appear to levitate. Right here, the background has turn into looser, with brushstrokes considerably wilder and messier. However it’s the foreground that has modified most noticeably. In works like Self-Portrait, 2022, and Mailbox No. 12 (Santa), 2022, the painter depicts himself and his instant household as snowmen with realistically rendered heads atop our bodies conceptualized as two circles drawn on the canvas utilizing dinner plates, a play on the truth that Apaļš, the basis of the artist’s surname, means “round” in Latvian. Complementary smaller compositions fluctuate in cuteness and scale. In Christmas, 2020, oversize strawberries relaxation subsequent to a fir tree, whereas The Spring, 2022, {couples} a tiny bunny with a poplar department. Predetermined by cultural and private context however stripped of didactics, it is a physique of labor that implies greater than it straight expresses. The motifs pervading Apaļais’s oeuvre now look like comfy in navigating the artist’s ever-shifting registers of the autobiographical.
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