Sometimes, it’s not about creating a work of art out of nothing, but about clearing it out of something. Kärt Hammer and Simon Sebastian Laumann are archaeologists. They ride into the visual noise of strokes and scratches, squares and motifs, forms and squiggles. They ride into the place where it’s bubbling and boiling, where there is a scream of colours behind every corner, a geometric intervention, where someone has scratched the wall with their nails – and their job is to clean out the right form, spot, splatter from it all with their brushes and handpicks.

Kärt Hammer has often exhibited her minimalist paintings of black and more black. This is the era that will probably be known as “Hammer’s happy period” in a hundred years’ time. Splashes of yellow, scrawls that came from God knows where and prehistoric spots emerge from underneath the black. Hammer has never been able to be a very precise artist: it is doubtful whether she can even draw a straight line, let alone manage precise mapping of painting surfaces or “sensitive blending.” Hammer would rather run amok. Hammer is not sheet music. Hammer is a force of nature.

She has tried to articulate her confused urges. “During the work process, the artist has an avalanche or a heap of ideas, both theoretical and visual, and from this pile of shit, all of which seems terribly nice at first, one must dig herself out and shake off what doesn’t need to be there to find clarity,” she says. But she does not manage to find clarity. There are no eureka moments. “Some things should remain a little unfinished,” says Hammer, whose works are like unexpected, deep outbursts of emotion that come and go, but nevertheless linger on in some dimension of eternity.

Simon Sebastian Laumann comes from Europe and his layers of painting have just as much spontaneity, but also a hint of cultural history. The layers that have settled there may not always have been put in place by Laumann himself. There are some mythologies. Some signs. Do them or don’t, they’re uninvited guests that sneer from the orgies of Laumann’s creations. They are references to something. Echoes of something. Laumann’s art might have been trash if he wasn’t maniacal. This is not random.

Laumann’s feverishness seems to be – as any obsession – methodical. Everything continues and repeats itself, grows and doubles. His works seem like cutouts from some larger massifs. He has not moved from smaller to larger, but first painted a whole world and then torn chunks of different sizes out of the flesh of this painted world. Looking at them more closely, we can see deep furrows pressed into the thick skin, while underneath it all, we can sense a dark primeval pulsing that smells like ash and soil.

Maybe this is what contemporary art is like. The kind that reveals itself in the early morning of the day after an orgy of information. Scraps and leftovers on the table. Someone has smeared the table with everything they could get their hands on. Someone’s colourful pile of vomit is lurking in the corner, someone has torn down the elegant curtains, someone has danced in a bowl of shapes with their muddy boots, splattering them everywhere. But they have not left yet. Two figures continue to rage. Smearing. Tearing. Hurling. Painting. Drawing lines. Splashing paints. Scribbling. Scratching. Scraping. Howling. Erasing. Throwing. Getting drunk. Sneering. Doodling. Continuing. Continuing. Continuing.

Accompanying text: Eero Epner
Graphic design: Ott Metusala
Installation support: Erkki Kadarik
Photography: Roman-Sten Tõnissoo & Joosep Kivimäe

The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.