Tamara van San |5

Sunlight, blossoms, flowers, leaves of the most tender green: vivid colours of spring adorn the six slender 2.20-metres-tall works Tamara van San made during her residency. Inspired by irregular wooden columns in an Uzbek mosque they might evoke a forest or some vibrant underwater world. Impressions of thumbs cover the entire surface of the works in short upward strokes, like an abstract pattern of petals and foliage. But something is missing from this picture: the current state of affairs, dominated by brute force, greed and demagoguery. To see joy and hope in the sculptures is to misread them. They are like bodies, full of internal pressure, bulging — about to burst perhaps, if it weren’t for Van San’s thumbs pushing back, mending, concealing any fissures… Open at the top, vulnerable to more dismal news, the columns still stand. Meanwhile, spring rapidly becomes a distant memory, a rather desolate longing.