RIGA.- Only two weeks – from 15 to 28 August 2018 – Andrejs Kostromins’ solo exhibition Silence Between Two Thoughts will be on view at the Happy Art Museum on the 7th floor of the Galleria Riga shopping centre in Riga (Dzirnavu iela 67).

Silence between two thoughts – that is the state of consciousness when the inner dialogue stops – the noise produced by the mind as a result of chaotic thoughts and reflections. We ceaselessly talk with ourselves about the world that surrounds us. In fact, we create this world through personal inner dialogue. When one stops talking with oneself, the world becomes what it should be.

At the basis of the exhibition’s idea is a painterly story about the brief fragments of enlightenment, about the sense of truth or reality during moments of meditation, prayer or the contemplation of something beautiful that each of us experiences from time to time, being outside thoughts, emotions and the arbitrariness of the mind.

For artist Andrejs Kostromins, the state of silence has become a boundless source of power and inspiration, which brings man together with nature and God. He is convinced that only when the mind is silent it is possible to see what is of value, eternal, what stands above fashion or tradition, to experience the beauty of the world and to simply observe it growing, acquiring form – just like a flower or a tree.

Unlike the previous series of paintings, Xenotopia I and Xenotopia II, where each work was accompanied by a description explaining the content, the new cycle has no story in the word’s familiar sense, there is no subject matter, no semiotically delineated conceptual certainty. Neither is it an appeal to reason, nor a desire to affect emotions or feelings, but rather an attempt to create vibrations which resonate with the viewer’s inner silence.

It is an exhibition-message, which is filled with poetic symbols, a sense of beauty, a contradictory unity of the rational and the emotional, the objective and the subjective, the conscious and the subconscious. They are fragments of fabric born in the depths of silence and themselves embodied on the surface of the canvas. In his new series, the painter has strived simply to be a mediator between the inner and the outer.

Visitors to the Happy Art Museum and Galleria Riga shopping centre will be able to see the exhibition daily from 15 to 28 August from 13.00 until 23.00. Admission is free.

Andrejs Kostromins (Dinvalds) was born in Riga, Latvia in 1970. He graduated from the Department of Graphic Art of the Janis Rozentāls Riga Art Secondary School in 1988 and the Department of Environmental Art of the Art Academy of Latvia in 1994. Since 2009 he lives and works in the UK.

Andrejs Kostromins has taken part in various group exhibitions in Belgium, Canada, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Russia, Spain, UK, USA, and other states. He has held several solo exhibitions as well. The artist’s works can be found in private collections in Australia, Canada, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Norway, Russia, USA, and elsewhere.