16 mm film projection,
2 min 56 s loop
Composition with Red, Blue and Green belongs to the cycle of works that have found their motifs in the Pärnu KEK Construction Company’s housing and industrial complex that was built in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The film looks at a window frame that is reminiscent of a Constructivist sculpture. The little birch that grows out of the window frame is cast in subtly changing light that varies from the setting sun to different conditions of artificial light, the effect being a kind of uncertain nocturne—it remains unclear whether we are witnessing day or night. While these notions fall apart, the film material’s movement itself comes to the foreground. A sudden close up of the leaves swaying in the wind interrupts the otherwise seemingly endless film loop.
“The new film Composition with Red, Blue and Green shows a close-up of a facade of mostly glass and concrete. A silver pipe from the inside ends towards us, shutters to the right and a sloping glass roof to the left enclose a red and blue coloured set of window frames. And – indeed surprisingly – a little green tree grows out of the building. Kuimet already indicates through the title what is just as evident in the subject matter. Today, Piet Mondrian’s geometric works that consisted of black lines with white and prime colour fields are recognisable to everyone. The facade of Andres Ringo’s Pärnu KEK Construction Company building not only shows, when seen through Kuimet’s eye, a formal relationship to Mondrian. The green tree also relates back to Mondrian’s earlier starting point as a landscape painter, and to the dichotomy between natural and human-made landscapes in general. Composition with Red, Blue and Green speaks in its filmic dimension of time as a trap as we experience shifts from day to night to day, only interrupted by a close-up into the thicket of the tree. Film time and real time become unsolvable riddles in Composition with Red, Blue and Green – no answer to the question of when is now seems possible. While Golden Home has fallen out of time, Composition with Red, Blue and Green seems stuck in its own looped time.”
– Nico Anklam, Paul Kuimet’s Five Volumes. Introduction text to the exhibition Five Volumes at Narva Art Residency, 2018