For his first exhibition at Pontone Gallery, Estonian artist, Tõnis Saadoja documents his response to personally-significant source material in two discrete sets of paintings: small pictures of skies and larger ones of architecture. He deploys a different technique for each. The skies are rendered with a full-colour palette in a naturalistic mode of representation, while the architectural subjects are graphically described in a minimal range of muted hues which emphasises flatness and a sense of cool detachment.
Saadoja follows a systematic programme to develop each of his themes. The paintings are worked on in series, images are variations of the same closely-related motifs, technique is consistent and unvarying. He uses a controlled model of expression where no brushstroke is out of place or ambiguous. The rendering is entirely descriptive and not speculative, colour values are definite and operate within tight tonal ranges. There is no overtly gestural handling that would subvert an effective representational description of the subject. Saadoja makes it very clear that his picture-making process is cerebral and deliberate.
The artist proposes a particular idea of the Nordic sky, one that for an Estonian is desired, but only available in summer. In the autumn and winter months it is dark and only experienced as a memory or ‘dream of the future’. His images fit within a Western convention of landscape painting, which he has so skilfully emulated, but are distinct from it.
The architectural studies are articulated in the impassive language of technical illustration and are seen as if through a mist. They are remote, ideal and utopian. There is a feeling of emptiness and absence of substance, despite the implicit solidity of such subject matter. This is counterbalanced, however, by the subtlety and nuance of the picture-making which evokes a romantic atmosphere, an echo of lost summer skies.
