Early works by Mare Vint.

Mare Vint (1942) is by today an artist, whose name most probably does not need any further acquainting. One of the top artists of the Estonian graphical art, isn’t she? Metaphysical landscapes, often used footpaths, coloured litos and cityscapes on them, in addition drawings and water-colours. This is the point, which we have reached by today. And this is also the point, from where we can look back and notice that “marevint”  is not only composed of the beforementioned. There is an abundance of layers.

Actually Vint studied glass art, worked at the end of the 1960ies for a shorter term as an art teacher, but soon became a freelance artist. And what would have been more characteristic to the decade than to be a  f r e e lance  a r t i s t. In the society rocked hippie spirits, ethics of the flower children crushed over heads and into the artistic life penetrated a new generation, with whom is  related the rapid and forceful invasion of vanguard. Mare Vint is an author, who belonged into both of these waves – both the flirtation of the hippies with the Oriental culture and the desire of the vanguard character to move the art limits were familiar to her. Still, Vint of the 1960ies remains exceptional, being while looking back from now, already then “ripe”, being firm and programmed in her goals.

The coloured abstract drawings by Vint, which in quite a free manner explore the connections between different colours and surfaces, carry in them clearly the fresh cultural influence of the end of the 1960ies. Both these and the Reflections-series, where Vint uses an optical deceit at surveying of the room, have been exposed quite rarely at exhibitions and Vint’s monographies, but as the artist herself stresses with the title of the current exposition: this is the beginning.The turn, which follows these small-sized coloured abstract sheets, is decisive. Suddenly the works by Vint are black-and-white, using of laconic ink, more or less repeating the format. Instead of abstractions there are landscapes and as repeating motifs women and birds. The existing ethics is completely forsaken, but what is even more thrilling – only within a couple of months Mare Vint has taken the author’s position, in which she is sitting until today and which is more meaningful and fruitful thatn the current colour research.

At the moment Vint is conducting a reasearch, what happens, if we plant a small circle onto an empty sheet, and into that small circle we place sitting birds. Or what happens, if at a certain moment we can’t help noticing a woman disappearing between bushes, her head and hands slightly hanging. These pictures never actually reflect us the reality the way we sense it. Vint shows us the existence of other realities, but this is not so much the creation of different worlds, but the search for an ideal core of certain existence. Vint does not use fantasy, but tries to grasp moments, when the seemingly durable world cover is fractured.
Let it be at least the moment, when a bird lifts its wings.
Because it might happen that just then the clouds crash in the sky.