On Thursday, September 10th at 7 pm, August Sai will open his solo exhibition “In the Skin of Paint” at Tütar gallery.
Art historian Triin Metsla notes in the exhibition text: “I looked at August’s paintings on the wall and realised that I am completely saturated with different semiotic codes. /…/ August, on the other hand, emphasised that content and art-historical references are not important. They are source material to be manipulated and worked with further. What matters is the formal aspect and technical mastery: to learn from the masters, but then to move beyond them.
This is where painting begins for him: the technical process itself becomes the concept. With sufficient humility before history, faith, and morality, he moves onto the technical plane. Through the right pigment, light, magnification, fear, and personal effort, he gets close enough to an old master. Then, suddenly, he stops and destroys it. Pure imitation would be naïve, uncritical, and dull, like academic painting.
Perhaps what matters is getting close enough in order to then move away. To get beneath the skin of the painting and then choose one’s own path."
August Sai (1983) is a painter whose work is in constant dialogue with the Western pictorial tradition. His paintings often form series that bring together visual references to recurring patterns and conventions in visual culture, which Sai reworks in new ways. Through his particular use of paint and its material qualities, personal experience becomes layered into the work.
Sai chooses his subjects primarily for their formal qualities, drawing on images from art history, film stills and staged photographs. He contrasts the illusion of a meticulously painted image with the materiality of the painted surface or the structure of its visual language. This reflects the ambiguity of seeing and the conflict between two pairs of eyes. One pair seems to belong to him alone, while the other looks through the lens of culture and inevitably sees not what is there, but what it believes to be there.
August Sai graduated with a BA in Painting from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2010 and took part in the FLACC Workplace for Visual Artists residency programme in Belgium that same year. His recent solo exhibitions include “The Story of Paint” at Hobusepea Gallery (2020) and “Twenty Cases” at Draakon Gallery (2018).
