An Author with Paint

While getting lost in the vortex of my IG feed the other day, I came across an image of August Sai’s work from his first show with Tütar gallery in Tallinn. Seeing archetypal Madonna- or Northern Renaissance-type sitters with strips of peeled-off portraits coming out of their eye sockets or mouths made me stop in my tracks and look into the artist and practice I wasn’t familiar with.

Sai is an Estonian artist whose practice can be boiled down to “painting about painting,” frequently using the image less as representation or narrative and more as a language we recognize. Sai does that by frequently quoting images from art history, films, or photographs, and reimagining their function and meaning through unorthodox technical approaches. Whether working with religious figures or random stand-ins from art-history paintings, Sai looks under their skin literally and figuratively. The results are paintings that tap into the uncanny not only through ingeniously revisited imagery, but also through their appeal as peculiar art objects. Cut, reconstructed, and cracked, they push our reading far beyond the initial recognition reflex.

In the Skin of Paint comprises a series of small-scale portraits in which the core format of the classical trope stays mostly untouched, but everything else is up to experimentation. “Sai peels the skin of oil paint from the canvas and shapes it by hand, turning the original image into something spatial and sculptural,” as the gallery describes the technique he developed. Stripped from its usual environment and reassembled into puzzling hybrids, his strange takes on classical imagery unsettle how we observe it. By transforming not only the painting as a medium but the image itself into a sculpting material, Sai emphasizes the importance of “seeing through the neutral eye of nature rather than the eye of culture,” as the exhibition text suggests. And just as clouded eyes thread and wriggle through the cavities and under the skin of the main image, or faces dissolve into parched gullies of paint, the viewer’s gaze and mind travel along the same strange, sometimes impossible routes. —Saša Bogojev