Folkestone gallery kollectiv is delighted to present Juha, a season of exhibitions of work by artists from Central Europe, each supported by a local performance artist and curated by Sammi Gale.

The season begins with Fireline (21 May - 7 June), a solo exhibition of new paintings by Russian artist Vladimir Logutov that seem to describe a line of fire seen from a distance.

Part of a new chapter in a series begun in London in 2023, when the artist left his native Russia shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, the sequence’s earliest works suggested flames up close: by turns, the kind of mesmerising fire one might gather around and the hair-singing centre of an explosion. 

As the series continues, the paintings seem to gradually ‘zoom out’, and it would be tempting to read this distance biographically, psychologically; as time passes, so does intensity. Yet such certainty is incompatible with the paintings’ inherent impassivity. They offer no explicit narrative of retreat or resolution: what they provide instead is space — enough for such thoughts to arise, and remain provisional.

Here in Folkestone, where on clear nights the lights of France are visible across the Channel, the work’s associations come with the territory: the thin bands of illumination in Logutov’s paintings seem to wink across distance in a similar register; ambiguous signals at a remove. They speak of borders and distances, of reflection and separation, of the human figure made small in the presence of something immeasurably larger — the experience of standing at the shoreline, looking out.

Sammi Gale