You ar cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition
Pehmed kontrastid / Soft Contrasts

This year’s international exhibition comes from France, presenting personal projects of two Parisian artists. “Soft Contrasts” brings together Christian Prunello’s nuanced, classically painterly, large-scale works, and Kaia Kiik’s experimental paintings where the artist collaborates with the forces of Nature – salt, sunlight, pigments, ashes, clay, rain etc.
and resulting in novel moods and spaces, from delicate play of light to 3D sculptures.
While living and building their career in the same city, the artists’ backgrounds are highly divergent: Kaia Kiik comes from Saaremaa, Estonia, Christian Prunello from Argentina, South America.

Kaia Kiik
Born in 1973 in Estonia, on Saaremaa Island, Kaia Kiik lives and works in Paris, France, after spending several years in Los Angeles, USA. She has Master Phil. Degree and is deeply interested in sciences and their links with contemporary art. Since 2003, her innovative artworks have been widely exhibited in Europe, but also in the United States.

Kaia Kiik’s work questions the relationship between nature, culture and man. She uses several organic and mineral materials transforming them through meteorological and other natural forces. In her approach, Kaia Kiik highlights the different forms of coexistence from delightfulness to conflict, drawing inspiration, in particular, from the concept of mimicri.
She is concerned with the dualism of culture and nature, the relationship of wilderness to arts and and sciences, the effect of environment on humans and their creations.

Christian Prunello
Autodidact. He trained in individual workshops at the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center with Alfredo Londaibere (painting), Alberto Goldestein (photography) and in the living models workshops of Estimulo de Bellas Artes with Fiels and Terribili (drawing), ( 1996-2000). Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Artist statement:
In my paintings, I am looking for an encounter, something unthinkable, which may never happen, so I wander.
From the formal point of view, I am interested in a half-human composition half-landscape, a nature formed by these two elements, the idea is to generate a psychological atmosphere, a vibration of color, an ideal.
Through the technique: oil on canvas, casein, coal, I seek to know the origin or meaning of the pigments / materials and give a metaphorical connotation to my work.
For “The memory of trees” charcoal and casein on wood, I try to write, as if I were a tree, my memories, using wood in three dimensions: 1) the final image (forest landscapes etc), 2) the wood support, 3) the charcoal. Casein as a medium is a fourth dimension since it comes from the milk of animals (we included), a work made of the same material in 3 different states.
Caput mortuum “dead head”: is the name of the pigment used to make “Foreign Land” and “That the fire burns”. This pigment apparently obtained from the ashes of the Egyptian mummies *, inspired me, by its name and by the weight of its history and its alchemical connotation, both “caput” to the backlight.

* Today, there is still a debate as to whether there is a relationship between mom brum and caput mortuum
.