Exhibition > Past > Haus Gallery

Haus Gallery 24.05.2005-01.06.2005

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Lovely times

I cannot paint slowly. I don’t want time to get stuck in my works. When I convey my own personal visions to others I have to draw a line somewhere — to limit, end, always give something up. That is why I always want to start again — in order to look further. I don’t believe that I could ever grasp everything.

“Vano Allsalu is mainly known by the fact that he is an abstractionist, who in addition to painting is a superb art educator and is currently editing the art portal KUNSTIKESKUS.EE. While living in Germany he has also organised several exhibitions in Estonia and keeps his hand on the pulse of the Estonian art life.
Allsalu’s consistently abstract expressions, executed as oil paintings on canvas, are in the first range connected with modern elegant interiors. Since the beginning of the nineties his paintings have undergone various developments and changes, yet they are unmistakably of Allsalu’s style. In a deliberate and convincing manner, sensitively mixed colours concentrate as forceful palette-knife strokes and brush strikes around a certain important center; they radiate from that center forming enviable factures, elaborate colour compositions and playful forms. Allsalu does not think on the canvas: he completes the picture in one session and yet every detail fits like in a perfect theorem. Thinking, tuning and timely concentration have been done slightly earlier in his subtle mind.” (Juta Kivimäe, 2005)

“In his paintings created with an untamed joy of colour each of the smallest brush and palette-knife stroke contains an independent emotion — quick, spontaneous and shiny.” (Reet Mark, 2004)

“At the beginning of the 1990s Vano Allsalu positioned himself as the first young Estonian abstract painter of the new generation, who was oriented to the keywords of the post-modern. After Ado Lill, he was the second Estonian painter who determined himself as a convinced abstractionist and has not followed other styles up to now. Vano Allsalu’s example was later followed by a whole pleiad of painters who reached the abstract manner of presentation for different reasons and along different paths but none of them can be regarded as pure abstractionists.
Such kind of self-determination is important as it faces the artist with the necessity to reflect something which is not existing in the reality, which contradicts the traditional ways of depiction and which therefore leads to a very personal artistic language. Therefore such kind of decision requires the author to aspire to the position of the Creator in its most original meaning. Vano Allsalu describes the situation into which he has positioned himself as a painter with the following remark:
“There are only elusive, non-existent rules — and even those are just mine. This is a good feeling.”
Already with his first paintings V. Allsalu introduced corrections into the principles of the Estonian school of painting and released the colour, as it were. His paintings are disharmoniously beautiful and offer untraditional colour compositions, which nevertheless are not difficult to accept by the viewer. The message, carried by his works since 1992, spoke the language of the concentrate of the new era and conclusive thinking. V. Allsalu introduced to the Estonian painting power, which had disappeared from there in the 1980s”. (Eha Komissarov, 2004).

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