The transition period is known to be challenging. it’s difficult to go through, difficult to watch from the sidelines, and even difficult to explain why it’s so challenging (“hormones raging” isn’t much of an explanation). Equally challenging is portraying it in a way that doesn’t come off as cheesy or overly sentimental. This delicate balance requires both a poetic sense of restraint and a sincere heart, ensuring the work doesn’t feel nostalgic or melodramatic.
Thus, this exhibition is like a kind of tightrope walk. “In our time, love letters were no longer sent” draws on motifs from polaroids taken during the artist’s late teenage years. Playful experiments with friends, fully made up in the bathtub, a pillow shyly grabbed as a cover — these images try to give a glimpse into moments where one thinks they’ve grown up, but in reality, they are just learning how to exist.
The enlargements of these tiny photo positives in suvi’s paintings work as a form of self-awareness in remembering — why photograph this person? Why pose like that? Who am i here? Who are you there? Suvi’s paintings raise questions about the images captured on photographic paper in moments of impulse, questions that were likely never considered at the time of taking the photos but that reveal the complexity of recalling youth. The questions asked by the viewers of suvi’s paintings were not asked by the models themselves. No one remembers the answers anymore. This is the problem with old love letters.
When they were real, only love remains.
”During our time, love letters were no longer a thing.”
9.07-24.08.2024
Artrovert gallery, tallinn, estonia
Curator: aleksander metsamärt
Photography: patrik tamm
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