Kristas Vindbergas-Auznieces personālizstāde "Circles Are Better Than Lines (oda pieskārienam)"

Our body remembers through touch. The new drawings created especially for the solo exhibition by Krista Vindberga-Auzniece are formed through repetition, silence, and concentration, where one movement slowly follows the next, until time accumulates on the surface itself. Charcoal crumbles, slips out of the control of the hand, and is embraced into the carefully prepared canvas; each subsequent touch preserves the traces of the previous one.

Vindberga-Auzniece’s special sensitivity – a sense of presence, similar to falling in love or some other intoxication – encounters images from a time that belonged to others. Old family albums, in which a certain detail, the relationship of areas, tension, or mystery has attracted attention, become a starting point for a long-term observation practice. A smile, a hand on the shoulder, a dance step, the fold of fabric, and carefully guarded flowers acquire new attention that was not granted to them, from the perspective of the persons once involved.

The outlines of the figures in the exhibition’s works – drawings on canvas and paper – have grown out of the rhythm of meditative observation, where movement itself has become the contemplation of thought. The author's hand is simultaneously an instrument, a measuring device, and a bearer of memory. The result, the drawing, acquires sculptural outlines, with its surface preserving the pressure of the palm, fingerprints, blood stains resulting from the persistent interaction between the artist's hand, charcoal, and canvas. Vindberga-Auzniece’s working material consists of pale black-and-white and sepia-toned photographic images found in a personal archive. These archetypes of bygone eras, so characteristic of our spacetime and still readable, are enlarged, sometimes hundreds of times, with the scale change also shifting the weight of their meaning. The miniature, seemingly insignificant, grows mass and muscle of meaning, the passing acquires a more lasting meaning, and a strange and unfamiliar gesture or posture becomes (re)known. Images captured well before the artist's birth now grow into personal empathy, intertwining the individual, whimsical, and selective nature of retrospective review with a broader field of collective memory seeking the neutralizing and sensual, the beautiful and the true.

In the exhibition’s works, the tendency at a one-angle-degree deviation from the top edge of the frame shows disobedience, a fortuitous randomness that levitates in the otherwise anonymously white void. In the exhibition, these quantities meet in a labyrinth of two dozen drawings that draws the spectator close to their surface and allows the perceptual narrative to form through movement, distance, and cyclical return. The line guides forward, accepts a beginning and an end, while the circle organizes and rearranges the breath and rhythm of the lines. Or "Circles Are Better Than Lines"? As an angular and static aspiration, both are good.