A bed and a mattress have been an indirect or direct subject of Jaan Elken’s works for about twenty years now. For a long time the size of the canvas on which the artist has painted his works has been that of the classical bed, namely 200x160 cm. Has it been a subconscious choice or not, who knows, and that is not important here. The paintings made for the exhibition “Poem to a Mattress” are a symbolic bow to a mattress as a mental image full of meanings that has undeservedly subsided to the rear in artistic creation. As such the works are linked up with the series of paintings dealing with memory and remembering, history and strata, and the immediate cognition of the environment and the surroundings. At the same time the paintings pay a slightly ironic tribute to the old masters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.


Valve Kirsipuu and Jaan Elken
Photo: Andres Liiv


August Künnapu and Heie Treier
Photo: Andres Liiv

The mattress topic was strongly evident in Jaan Elken’s works at the Space and Form exhibition in 1999 where the artist displayed four over-painted mattresses with women’s names under a common heading La Bella Vita. In the same year the mattresses were deposited by the Art Museum of Estonia, and as a happy coincidence they were returned to the artist this summer. Elken cut the ragged, dirty and torn bed-pads robustly into halves and assembled the pieces onto a piece of canvas together with other materials familiar from Elken’s earlier paintings. Through the paintings the artist gave the mattresses a new life, being engaged in re-use, or recycling, to use the modern term. Re-use in the mental and symbolic sense of the word, creating a new field of meaning around the doomed mattresses through the paintings.


Anu Kalm, Lilian Meister, Mari Roosvalt and Mara
Photo: Andres Liiv

Silvia Sosaar, KIWA and Hanno Soans
Photo: Andres Liiv

The very real mattress repeated as a leitmotif brings an extremely personal and nostalgic moment into the works abstract by nature, although already the canvas itself is as intimate for Jaan Elken as the mattress or some other material he uses. On the canvas where the fragments of the mattress have been assembled onto the surface of the painting, the intimate and the personal are mixed with the universal and the public. The aged mattresses originating from an unknown place have seen it all – the dreams dreamt by the sleepers, the deaths and the births – the different layers of personal history have sunken into them. The mattress as one of the most immediate matters that covers an important part of a human being’s everyday routine evokes abject-like  experiences when placed on the intimate surface of the canvas. The abstract background of the “mattress”-series’ paintings, like in Jaan Elken’s earlier works, is marked with certain text that creates a network of semiotic meanings but doesn’t offer an exact hint for decoding the works. According to the artist the texts included in the context of the painting should not be regarded so much as narrative elements but as denotation of communication. In the current exhibition the text layer is a little deeper, indicated so already by the word “poem” in the heading of the exhibition and a poem that was created concurrently with the paintings and was his first, as the artist said.


Mart Lepp, Andri Ksenofontov, Jaan Klõšeiko and Marko H.J. Kuningas
Photo: Andres Liiv


Photo: Andres Liiv