Drawings from Exile

7.3-24.3.2016 Kallio Kunsthalle, Helsinki

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The place you call home is not necessarily the place you inhabit. Circumstances might lead some of us to a life of travel, willingly or unwillingly, and home becomes a place of memories and dreams.

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Drawings from Exile exhibited a series of eight ink and acrylic drawings. Their common theme was the flight from home; a sense of homelessness and displacement. This particular series had its beginning in the artist’s previous exhibition at Arkadia International Bookshop in November 2015. Since then, the colours turned brighter, the geography of depicted places wider and more specific, yet the manner of drawing remained as expressive and straightforward as then. The ink line is simple, perhaps even naïve, but there is an unequivocal psychological complexity about Bourgeot’s drawings.

The drawings do not depict specific cities, streets or houses, but represent moments from the artist’s personal memories, fantasies and emotions. Through this abstraction, they obtain the quality of speaking for all abandoned places, which still continue to exist in the minds of those who departed from them.

The house, the gate, the room – have become symbols of Bourgeot’s sense of home. The spaces are calm, silent, still, and empty in a curiously emphasized way. The viewer is called to enter them, and make them his or her own. The room of French window, 2016, has no people, no furniture, no light – there is just an open window, the impression of dark air coming in and a deep feeling of loss and absence. The longer we look, the more we wish to find out what might lie beyond the window.

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The exhibition was curated by Anastasia Isakova.