I've seen love, and it looks nothing like this ♥︎

A recap of 2 exhibitions and the period in my life that formed them.

In this post, I want to reminisce about the two years I lived in Madrid and the two exhibitions that resulted from that time in my life.

For me, this exhibition series is intrinsically connected to my young adulthood. After university, I moved from Seville to Madrid. I wanted to leave behind the memories of my adolescence in Seville. Nothing particularly bad happened there; I just wanted to start adulthood with a clean slate. And who doesn't want to go live in the biggest city available at that age? If Seville felt like adolescence, Madrid felt like young adulthood.

For me, big cities carry this intoxicating feeling of being a complete nobody, this idea that you could be anyone and do anything.

As a typical young adult, I spent my time in Madrid chasing boys, which is why the resulting exhibitions are also themed around love. Those years were shaped by the positive aspects of love, but also by the heartbreak and the loneliness, ultimately forming me into a proper adult.

What made the process more complicated was that I’ve always been terrible at expressing myself in words. Even when the person who I’m trying to explain something to is myself. Paintings, I can do, but words, not so much. As a result, I was fascinated by people who could. I especially liked very short-form poetry, as it fascinated me that people were able to evoke so many feelings in so few words. And how easily short poems can stick to your memory and remain in your mind for years.

The poet whose work I was most drawn to in these years was David Xam. Although we were strangers, him in Kashmir, me in Spain. Often I felt like we were both trying to express the same thing, just through different mediums: him through poetry, me through painting.

Years later, when I began thinking about making an exhibition about this period of my career, his work immediately came to mind. But when I went looking for his poems again, I discovered he had deleted them all from the internet. All I had left was what I remembered of the poems and a few screenshots I had taken of his work years ago. This felt like a real loss, not just for me but also for other readers that had found meaning in his writing. So I contacted him and shared that I was really sad about his work no longer being available, and proposed this idea of collaborating to produce an illustrated poetry book and two exhibitions. And that’s how this project came into being.

For the first exhibition, I picked “I’ve saved all my secrets for you”, as the title. This referred to the fact that there had been quite some years between the making of the artwork and the exhibition. I have always struggled with talking about my work soon after its completion; I feel like I need time to get some emotional distance between myself and the artwork. It wasn’t until I moved back to Estonia that I finally felt ready to share them. The first exhibition opened in 2022.

I knew what I wanted the book and the second exhibition to be titled before I knew anything else. There was one poem I kept thinking about over the years, and it seemed perfect to summarise this period in my life.

I’ve seen love
and it looks nothing
like this ♥︎

I feel these few words say more about love than most authors can say in ten thousand words. It captures something so essential about love.

That it is complex beyond imagining. No matter how much we try to fit it within the boundaries of a perfect symmetrical cartoon heart, it will not fit. Love is never simplifiable. It might be better, it might be worse, but it’s never ♥︎.