Arne Maasik’s LIMEN is a poignant and thoughtful experimentation with threshold. Be they limits, demarcations, confines, edges, we live with it day and night. With Maasik’s work we are always called to look. A casual glance won’t do. Surrender to LIMEN and a growing desire to stare at these images grabs us as if to conquer their inscrutable gaze. By now, in fact, we know they too are lookingback at us.
Limen is often likened to a thin line where everything is white on one side and black on the other, with no shades of grey. The agony of the ‘here and now’ placed against the dream of the ‘there and then’. It embodies both the promise and the lure of what is hidden and immanent and its potential to disclose and become manifest, not without a daunting fear of the unknown. It’s limbo we are describing, or, as some have called it in the past, a living, infernal nightmare. Another stare, then, unexpectedly, in the span of an instant that tends to infinity that thin line expands into a new space, into an escape.
Maasik provides precisely this space, so that it can grow and live inside us and become a wholesome part of who we are. LIMEN is a chance to become more human amidst our own humanity. We conquer what would otherwise be nothing but a horrible inside-outside that would banish us from the realm of possibility. /—/
LIMEN represents the point where the artist’s idea both converge and diverge at the same time. Our first impression already tells us that limits have been overcome. The perceptual threshold of the space captured on film flows above the levees of art. It fluctuates between photography, architecture and painting, creating a theatrical vision where space morphs into poetry, beyond the physicality of place.
Photographic technique gives way to Arne Maasik’s superior ability to sense through the viewfinder a timeless atmosphere that leaves our gaze free to pierce through space to broaden the field of perception. As a result, the surrounding landscape permeating the building with its umbral light is allowed to exalt the multi faceted quality of this place, on both the physical and the emotional levels. /—/
LIMEN lands itself to limitless readings. Space is merely shown, unembellished, in order to tell a story in a context that we are encouraged to imagine. It’s immersed in the nature that surrounds it in such a way that we feel its heartbeat when looking at the photographs. /—/
