Katrin Piile’s personal exhibition The Rabbit Who Fell into the Pool Full of Balloons

„I am sitting in my studio, the leaking boiler counts the time like a clock. Emergency situation has lasted for years. Self-isolation has become a daily routine. Repetitions, repetitions, repetitions. For a long time, I have been thinking how such closed life has influenced me. The new reality has lasted for so long that I cannot remember the old reality any more. My self-isolation and the new reality have hyperrealistic dimensions where the contact with the world is set up through various channels of internet. I got the answer to my question what the isolation has done to me from other people who were forced to stay home this spring. According to Facebook posts, I realized that there was certain ironic attitude towards the emergency situation influencing our mental well-being. Our environment and the surrounding objects obtained a new dimension – people identified with things against all odds. What was considered absurd earlier became a new normality. Some of these people never planned to return to their earlier lifestyles.
I used to think that perhaps it would be better not to talk about it at all. Perhaps I’ll leave a strange impression. These people, however, keep posting their oddities in Facebook day by day. Therefore I confess: for years, I have considered myself to be a saggy stuffed toy rabbit lying around the window sill of my studio (Fuck! Now I suddenly remembered that I was a rabbit at the carneval that took place when I was in the 2nd grade. Perhaps I started to relate myself to a rabbit already back then.) So that’s how I keep encapsulating and shrinking.
The world is existing somewhere else. The algorithm throws me the world through glamorous colour photos in the internet flow: it is perfect, glossy, bright and acrylic. Which reminds me of the fact that I have run out of black paint, exactly having completed half of the work. The shop is too far and going there would break the routine. At the same time, the rest of the world seems to be just like Candyland – pretty, colourful, with glossy latex and film and yet somehow indecent and hardly holding together. It is fragile just like a balloon filled with water, waiting for being destroyed. Actually everything is good, since my brother promised to come and fix the boiler and perhaps we’ll also go and shop some paint. The rabbit thing was more of a joke. See you at the exhibition!“

Like Piile’s earlier artwork, current exhibition continues the search for formal abstractness  through realistic objects. Oil paintings and ball-point pen drawings repeat and transform two objects until these lose their formal identity, finally heading towards emptiness or formlessness. The artist’s hyperrealistic pieces can be characterized by high technical quality. Her artwork plays with form as in the field of sculpture as well as contains the qualities of seriality and documentation related to photography and video. The volume of work with hyperrealistic painting and drawing technique leaves an absurd impression when expressing the idea; but sometimes art supposedly becomes art when rationally unjustifyable choices are made.
 
Katrin Piile is a freelance painter and drawing artist who lives and works in Tallinn. She graduated from the department of painting at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2010. Piile has participated in exhibitions since 2006. She is a member of the Estonian Painters’ Association since 2019.

Supporters: Martin Piile, Art Allmägi, Enriko Mäsak and Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Exhibitions in Draakon gallery are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Ministry of Culture and Liviko Ltd.