Stupidity and meaning are so difficult to tell apart.
– Toomas Paul

When I met August last week, I was certain that I was the least suitable person to write an accompanying text for his exhibition.

There was a book by Peter Sloterdijk on top of his cupboard, he told me about Flannery O’Connor – whose admirer I have been for a long time – and followed it with David Foster Wallace’s famous fish anecdote. Yet he avoided the relationship to religion and Western Christian philosophy, which I had hoped would form the basis of our entire conversation and of this text. August repeatedly stressed the importance of seeing through the neutral eye of nature rather than the eye of culture, without (over)interpreting every symbol, icon, and index. I found myself wondering where one could possibly find a writer without the “cultural” eye.

I looked at August’s paintings on the wall and realised that I am completely saturated with different semiotic codes – my undergraduate obsession with the Northern Renaissance, religion, being a quarter-believer, and so on. All that ran through my mind were Christian narratives: Dürer, Luther, Memling, Sittow, etc. August, on the other hand, emphasised that content and art-historical references are secondary, serving primarily as material for further exploration and transformation. His focus lies instead on form and technical mastery: learning from the masters and then moving beyond them. Above all, he is interested in the process itself.

August showed me countless pigment tests stored in boxes, along with screens and lighting setups he had developed to study old paintings more closely. I began to see these experiments as a kind of search for truth. Perhaps, before allowing himself to play with historical material, he first needed to pay his respects to it, to quite literally get under its skin.

As the conversation went on, however, I began to suspect that he had already resolved the narrative side of his work for himself and simply wasn’t sharing it with me. I trusted my own instincts enough to know that techne could not be the only thing at work here.

That same evening, he sent me something by Flannery O’Connor, and I remembered her once describing herself in words to this effect: “I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness.” I found myself thinking something similar about August. And skin, somehow, holds it all together.

This is where painting begins for him, with the technical process itself becoming the concept. With a certain humility towards history, faith, and morality, he turns to technique. With the right pigment, light, magnification, fear, and his own effort, he gets close enough to an old master. Then, suddenly, he stops and destroys it. Mere imitation would be naïve, uncritical, and dull, like academic painting.

Perhaps what matters is getting close enough to then pull away. Getting beneath the skin of the painting before going your own way.

But perhaps I am completely wrong.

I left in a light drizzle, thinking that I would probably write this text and then let it go. Let the author die, let the text live a life of its own. The main thing is not to do injustice to the artist’s honest method with some elaborate curatorial burst of words that revels in its own beauty, only to wilt by the end of the day like a ditch flower in an elegant designer vase.

18 August 2026
somewhere high above Central Europe

Accompanying text: Triin Metsla
Graphic design: Ott Metusala