The painter SANDRA KRASTIŅA (1957.02.03), first and foremost, jogs our memory about the group of artists called “Maigās svārstības” [Tender Oscillations], in which everyone possesses a sovereign, inimitable personality, with a unique world view and artistic style. The solo exhibition of paintings by Sandra Krastiņa “Should it be told to anyone?” opens at the Daugava Art Gallery on 4 March. Twelve paintings are exhibited in which the defining role belongs to amalgamation or juxtaposition of various materials and techniques, something that has always been in her range of interests. “I like to juxtapose various textures, the associative basic features attributed to identifiable materials, such as sand, ash, metal or glass,” comments the artist. “It may prove helpful in creating the substance of the message of my painting. I select the materials based on the idea I want to accomplish.” I want to add that the works exhibited here give a representation not only of the formal quests and finds of the artist; with their message they breathe subtlety and elegance, they are delicate, even fragile in their emotional aura, permeated with that feeling of angst known only to loners. But this is what Sandra Krastiņa has to say when commenting on her new exhibition: “What interests me is a theme – how is the objective “motif of the story” created amidst the subjectively substantiated totality of expressive means of the work of art which would also relate to perception of other people and things experienced by them. How free and unfettered is the spectator’s interpretation evoked by a work of art with the suggestive explanation in the picture’s title, with the message deliberately encoded by the author herself. That explains why in my exhibition I feel like “sitting on two chairs” – both as a spectator watching my earlier efforts and as an author who employs elements of street art and graffiti – the provocatively vexing and superficial means of expression so widely in circulation today. The exhibition also provides a chance for me to use the canvas as a medium for displaying intimate “conversations”, normally shrouded with tight-lipped secrecy, as something that invites for an open dialogue. Still, I am aware that, in my paintings, I keep “talking” about one and the same: how commensurate, as a point of reference, the individual is with space and time. About the time that is measured not only in hours and about the space that is more than a closed quadrangle adorned with colours.”

The exhibition will be on display at the Daugava Art Gallery until Monday 23th March.