Exhibition > Past > ArtDepoo

ArtDepoo 15.10.2008-01.11.2008

Common people

The common people depicted by Toomas Kuusing stand before the art public for the fifth or sixth time already. Sometimes they are perfectly painted on canvas, yet another time elaborately executed in linocut or even digitally enlarged graphics. At the exhibition in ArtDepoo one can sympathize with people’s lives and actions painted on canvas, round pieces of timber as well as on cupboard-doors that open.

Toomas Kuusing, travelling around the world with the Non Grata Art Group, is inspired by the very same people around and close to him – people with whom he carries out performances, with whom he goes fishing at 5 o’clock in the morning or brews home-made beer. The action-packed paintings depict both the actions of Non Grata that have been taken out of their original environment and have acquired fantastic measurements, as well as imaginary characters engaged in various bizarre activities. The plot of Kuusing’s paintings is rich; they are dynamic, yet peaceful and suggestive fixations of the stopped moment. Next to Doctor Helbergoth, comical characters wearing suits and rabbitmasks, outer-space creatures has Kuusing raised ordinary Obinitsa men of flesh-and-blood - Kalle, Eedu, Väino and Paul to metaphysical level.

Kuusing has enriched the environment of his paintings with quotations from the classics of art history – lending overcrowded fantastic scenes from Hieronymus Bosch illustrating the moral and religious commentaries, and solemnly phantasmic candle-light from the Frenchman Georges de La Tour.

The paintings with their juicy headings, filled with surprising characters and actions, speak for themselves; at the artist’s request let just the following quotation from the Book of Moses be provided here:


Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shall you labour, and do all your work but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger that is within your gates! For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God gives you! You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour. You shall not covet your neighbour's house. You shall not covet your neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is your neighbour's.

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