Estonian artist, Kristi Kongi, makes paintings and site-specific installations. Her work is rooted in a formal exploration of light, colour and space, initiated by her memories of personally-significant landscapes and their emotional associations. Her first exhibition at Pontone Gallery consists of paintings inspired by such sublime geography and a ‘spatial intervention’ in the form of a wall painting.
On first encountering these pieces one is struck by an intense level of almost psychedelic colour. The pictures are highly structured compositions of saturated colour fields and curved abstract shapes, which allude to the spatial divisions, contours and horizons of landscape. Kongi’s palette is predominantly warm, featuring vivid crimsons, dusky oranges, rich purples and prismatic magentas. These hues are laid against a cooler range of lemon yellows, azure blues and brilliant greens, which are in turn augmented by darker shades, making for dramatic contrast and resonant optical effects.
For Kongi such images carry associations with profound experience and a sense of spiritual uplift. Colour has an undiluted corporeal affect, which she directs at the viewer to invite full immersion in a perceptual experience. The artist’s original encounter with place and atmosphere is translated into a modified visual code for us to decipher. There is a definite sense of making work as a transformative process, which we are, in turn, invited to take part in.
This recent work is, in most part, a response to boundless skies. Kongi evokes the transcendent luminosity of the heavens, the infinite stars and the essential, life-giving energy of the sun as it models and reveals the physical world. Kristi Kongi’s shimmering and lustrous body of work locates her in a significant relationship with a sense of place and is a sumptuous testament to the elemental power of light.
