Curtain, screen, hidden space
/ Paavo Matsin /
It is a well-known fact that pickpockets widely use so-called screens in their activities. It can be a newspaper, an outer cloth thrown over the arm, or even another person. In the shadow of a screen, one’s actions are carried out, which no one is allowed to see. Once an acquaintance of mine became the owner of an apartment where a professional card player had lived. In the middle of the room was a table, under which a knife with a scabbard was fixed, so that it could be grabbed without being noticed at the moment of need. Böhme says that the devil has no faces, only masks.
A person generally needs aids to reach the final goal, lower level truths can be used as symbols of higher levels (Guenon). In this exhibition, the landscape of the murder scene is placed next to the view from the artist’s dream, or the structure from the dream (a house made of matches) is placed on the scene of the murder. What is this kind of combinatorics trying to demonstrate to us? Is there a patient in front of us with his drawings? Or will we instead be shown a scientist sitting in an office analyzing some reflections of complex psychic processes?
A screen or curtain also separates us from the metaphysical world according to our level of preparation. There are things in life that we have no right or need to see (yet or ever). The curtain only rises when the situation and time are right. In various initiation rituals, the truth is revealed to the profane in so-called dangerous, chaos-like situations where a person does not have ordinary clothes, ordinary gender, etc. So in history there are traces of boys dressing up as girls and vice versa. However, it is more accurate to say that during initiation one is bisexual, androgynous. Plutarch has given examples of such customs in Greece, in Sparta, where the bride was dressed in men’s clothes and left in a dark room to wait for her groom. But in Argos, the bride stuck a false beard on herself on the wedding night. The goal of all such combinatorics is to go beyond the limits of your usual self, to restore some kind of original state. In a way, this creates a situation of initial chaos, a moment where everything is possible, where great changes can happen to a person. It is even said that this is the only way the truth can flash.
Sometimes we are shown a lot of things in dreams, but this abundance is actually deceptive. A dwarf, a car, a castle in lights, Maori, faces from the clouds – we should rather ask: who is the One behind it all? Hungarian alchemist and writer Béla Hamvas has discussed wine: “What is wine? Hieratic mask. Someone is behind it. Someone who has an infinite number of masks and who at one and the same moment lives behind the mask of Mercury, gold, f-sound and red color, who at the same minute is a book, a story, a woman’s laugh, glasses and a fried duck.” (B. Hamvas “The philosophy of vine”, Verb publishing house 2006, pp. 25-26)
“Taste and see…” (Psalms 34:9)
Lauri Koppel (1986) lives and works in Tallinn. He graduated from the graphic arts department of the Estonian Academy of Art in 2012. He is a member of the Estonian Artists’ Association and the Association of Estonian Printmakers and master of the offset lithography workshop “Ubu Noir”. In 2010, he received the Eduard Wiiralt scholarship issued by the Ministry of Culture, and in 2022, the Wiiralt main prize.
Supporters: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Viljandi Town Council
Thanks: Mihkel Ilus, Paavo Matsin, Gudrun Koppel, Allan Appelberg, Ingvar Heamägi
