Is Toomas Vint a landscape painter?
If an artist paints a landscape, what does he see and depict: are these simply endless roads, summer horizons, the colours of the forests, heavenly cloud rhythms or parks playing the game of changing seasons?

The landscape paintings of Toomas Vint invite you to step through the picture frames into the green space under the blue sky. The frames are left behind, and with each step the world around us becomes an oddly metaphysical enchanting experience.

Mystical light, in the form of thoughts and perceptions, glimmers from deep inside the picture – the landscape is only camouflage, an intermediator that helps us to talk about something more than a tree by the edge of the forest. The green shimmer on Toomas Vint’s paintings is actually a cipher, just like everything else – blooming heather or a descending cloud. The unities created by the artist are not random. Each object has its own precisely measured spot, each green has its own glimmer, each blue has its depth and yellow its shadow. The landscapes of Vint are formulas that enable us to calculate the answer that comes after the equal sign – satisfaction. It is a perfectly composed moment, in which the hypothesis of doubt has no room; a setting where everything is in its right place. Knowing that in one fell swoop something has actually been achieved and important decisions have been made. The right time to stop in the dignified and rightfully approving light of existence – to look out of the window, ‘the window of Toomas Vint’, the look disappearing into ideal landscapes that illustrate the feeling of a perfect harmony. 

Haus Gallery is exhibiting 24 oil paintings from Toomas Vint’s newer works. The exhibition, which showcases works which were completed in 2016-2019, celebrates the artist’s 75th birthday. Toomas Vint, a self-taught painter, is indisputably positioned as a classic of Estonian modern art because his personal, conceptual landscapes have always been recognisable and appreciated. His work balances on the edge of naive realistic imagination and an illusory and idealised world view. The paintings take the viewer into a world where another kind of gravity and time rule. In Haus Gallery’s exhibition hall, the paintings of Toomas Vint are like 360 degrees of ideal horizons, the gripping view of which can be discovered through painting windows that are hung on the walls. 

Piia Ausman 

Catalogue PDF