Publications

Madara Neikena. Never Fading Light. 2023
“Each painting is like a fragmented memory that I remember as a short, moving picture with possible probabilities. Being elsewhere affects me and leaves an impression on my painting as well. It cannot be overlooked and hidden that the landscapes I paint are not found here but far in the North. When I was a small child, I drew the Moomin troll from the books of Swedish-speaking Finnish author, novelist, painter, illustrator and comic strip author Tove Jansson. The books I read in my early childhood have had a great impact on me until today, although that naivety and dreaminess fades and crumbles with time, as the possibility is allowed that another ideal world of dreams is possible, like an unfading light that we see and yet do not see, but are able to feel.
The Nordic countries across the Baltic Sea have been a great curiosity for me. The desire to get there and see if it is the same as what I read in the books, stories about trolls, the harshness of nature, mountains, fjords and the Norwegian cousine, especially the brown cheese and aurora borealis... And so step by step I came to one, to another and yet another field of unfading light, allowing for the possibility to be, as it was, is and will be...” Madara Neikena, 2023.

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ENDLESSNESS

Madara Neikena

Clarity. Endlessness. Vastness. Air. Presence.
While walking in a forest, along the sea, through paths of swaps and fields, at every step, perceived images transform into paintings and their fragments. I can’t seem to manage painting them as they move so fast, flowing by and changing quicker than I can. That’s why there are lines, ticks, dots - they are touches upon a moment in an endless motion. Sea is the one that associates the most with endlessness, inconceivable and so powerful...

The exhibition series is a particular sequence of works in which I set myself a goal to paint them in a specific time period, so that the link between them would be mutually strong.  The works were created in the plain air, as well as transferred from a smaller format to a bigger one. 

They (the paintings) are stories about a specific and at the same time absolutely non-specific place that allows reaching a different reality. Nature transforms in colour-line rhythms on canvas. Colour fields embody life in both, calmness and endless variability.  

When I paint, I can live in the world depicted on canvas. Ticks, lines and coincidences create the stories on their own; I just follow them on canvas or paper with a paintbrush. While painting, ideas flow quickly, so I have to indulge and make a decision, where I’m going to allow my fingertips to touch and where in the blink of an eye I have to abandon everything that is unnecessary.

I’m interested in nature and environment, especially the seaside, which I perceive not exactly in its direct sense of the word. I don’t identify the depicted seaside as a particular place, but as world created by my sensations. The seaside and the presence of the sea subjugate all senses, perceiving sound, taste, touch and sight. The seaside for me is endlessness.

My paintings do not require verbalization. I believe that the image is a text that should be read by oneself, without imposing anything. The image loses an intangible sense of enchantment and freedom for each of us to perceive it differently if it gets dissected and put in a particular frame. I think one should be free to walk along the beach portrayed in my paintings on his or her own.

2016.