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Mati Karmin has established his appearance on the art
scene very effectively. In the dazzle of spotlights and accompanied by
the beating of a drum, he had already become a star on the Estonian sculpture
scene during the years of his studies. The niche has been confirmed and
assured from year to year by positive reviews in the press and by prestigious
and numerous one-man-exhibitions. It seems that the scope of his talent
and personality are beyond doubt. However, the critic will still run into
difficulty when he has to define behaviour with respect to character.
Reviews reflect a recommendation that he show more synthesis in his work.
He is criticised for being superficial and eclectic. /…/ Mati Karmin
seems to be a person without style, or, to define it more precisely, a
person who employs many styles. Art critics have repeatedly pointed out
his inclination to imitate art deco but with equal freedom he uses the
methods of Cubism: forming either pure cubist plasticity or amalgamating
it by unexpectedly intersecting organic form with different geometric
planes. The sculptor has mastered this traditional, realistic manner of
creating. But just as easily, he starts to play with the realistic manner
and turns it into an expressive and ironic grotesque. He has been gifted
with a precious talent for sculpting - the gift to conceptualise the substance
of the mass he is working with: its density, weight, balance and eventual
physical form. At the same time he magnificently perceives the whole,
the emptiness as a lack of mass, or as anti-mass. The artist himself claims
that sculpture is well-organised emptiness. /…/ Perhaps it is just
here where we have to search for the author’s identity. His versatility,
amazing skill in altering his face to incarnate and transmute his elusiveness
- all this is only the nature of his talent, but also, to a certain extent,
deliberate. There is logic in this confusion. How much of it is conscious.
M. Karmin himself can hardly tell us but the existence of this is beyond
doubt. His talent contains a vibrant embryo. He is fated for infinite
creative activity. He exists only when he moves and acts like a relative
photon.
Hence his
astonishing productivity which is supported by the cognition of his power.
Such a charge of energy simply can’t fit into the tunnel of a style
once worked out, or into the trend once selected. He needs other playgrounds
for his free and spontaneous movements and he helps himself to them. The
mere spontaneity of his talent itself forces him to disregard the demands
of the time. But the other side of the thing is no less important. Mati
Karmin seems to realise one essential truth for the inner freedom of an
artist; he does not intend to be too contemporary. As Chesterton once
said: “the road of the centuries is scattered with the corpses of
genuine contemporary people”. The vitality of M. Karmin costs too
much for sacrificing it for actuality.
And for this reason one cannot consider M. Karmin as a post-modernist,
or late avant-garde artist. The point is that he is both this and that,
he is both here and there, and at the same time, neither here nor there.
He is he, himself in those spacious, wonderful frames, which time sets
before him. /…/. But wood as a material, revealed the general and
fundamental basis of Karmin’s creativity: genetically preserved
rural mentality, which resides in the refined layer of intelligence and
begets original synthesis. Most likely, just here lies the source of the
master’s independence, from here originates his fearlessness of
tradition, fearlessness of being traditional without epigonism, the skill
to be profound and straightforward, the skill to see and understand the
world.
Prof., Dr.phil. Boris Bernstein. Mati Karmin.
Tallinn, 1994.
At the end of 1990 Karmin has removed himself from active exhibition life.
He is prosperously busy with commissioned monuments only and business
enterprise. His departure from independent sculpture was a ceremonial
rite. Mati Karmin hadn’t left, on the contrary sculpture had. Karmin
had planned and presented this transition so carefully that there was
no doubt as to who the loser was. /…/The first recalcitrance about
these new claims didn’t however prevent him, two years later, from
delivering a classical and readable installation “My Father”,
which was first exhibited in the spring of 1994 at the Sammas Gallery.
A virtuoso bronze-modeller abandoned his crafted professionalism and piled
up on shelves a large collection of glass vessels and cartons containing
plant seed, which had been left him by his father who had been a botanist.
Enthroned in the middle of them where his father’s special certificates
diplomas and prizes. With this Karmin led the way to an autobiographical
theme in 1990’s Estonian Art. Just that kind of skill triumphed
over manual creativity, encyclopaedic classification and retrospective
narrative dominated powerfully for the first time creative hand-craft.
Aesthetic principles were nowhere to be seen, not even in the creation
the man who had successfully developed out of the Estonian figurative
tradition. After him others followed. /…/ In 1994, he presented
at the opening of the Soros Contemporary Arts Centre Annual Exhibition
“Non Existent Art” a simulation of a bomb alert. Curator Urmas
Muru’s speech was interrupted with the message of a bomb scare,
then ambulances arrived and the entrance of the gallery was surrounded
by hazard tape and the situation came under the control of other, concerned
rescue services. On one hand this undertaking was a response to the curator’s
conception but on the other hand it managed to reflect a new mental mechanism
in art. Art is not created anymore but constructed. The construction has
no real substance but it is still capable of calling forth real reactions
and emotions. In 1995 he exhibited in the Tallinn Art Hall a metal cage
inside of which was a circular saw, and around the mesh were hung a number
of small bronze crucifixion figures. In this composition there was some
kind of reproach - a huge, mechanical monster like something noble gone
to ruin. A high minded bronze work versus banal industrial production
and social activity. Here we can see a conscious watershed, which Karmin
managed to cross by swimming, but on landing on the other bank he lost
interest. If most of the aged artists in Estonia perceived aesthetic values
as being forced into the background or even the end of art itself, then
for Karmin this meant only the giving up of plastic modelling. With this
truth, Karmin stepped out of active exhibition activity and transferred
over to monumentalism, where plastic modulation and the figurative were
still valid. Here he continues still to have the possibility to demonstrate
his manual proficiency.
Johannes Saar. Artists of Estonia 2.
Center of Contemporary Arts, Estonia, 2000.
© Center for
Contemporary Arts, Estonia
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