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Cold Traces of a Crime Of Passion

Johannes Saar (1/2016)

Johannes Saar went to Vano Allsalu's solo exhibition "Afterburn".

 

 

17. XII 2015–16. I 2016
Vaal Gallery


I would like to say that there is something criminal about Vano Allsalu's relationship with paint. Leaving aside any hackneyed imagery of being on fire creatively and "afterburning", which has emerged as the title of his exhibition at Vaal Gallery, let us instead focus on the fragile moment that the canvas, drowning in paint with the artist's aggressive painting of its surface, for some unknown reason turns out to be "worthy of the salon" and as a meaningful message finds its way to the viewer.

Let us also leave aside the painting's narrative titles, which are overly heavy and meaningful. They diminish the independence of the paintings, turn them into illustrations of paraphrased events and divert our attention elsewhere. Allsalu is after all interested in paint and its accumulation on the canvas, the furious labour of the paintbrush across the picture surface and the pattern of dance steps that it leaves in its wake – the precise powerful line of spatter, that allows the viewer to make ballistic calculations, like a detective at a crime scene, about the circumstances that caused the paint to be so haphazardly flung at the canvas.

 

Vano Allsalu
Waiting for the Barbarians
2015
acrylic, canvas, 160×140 cm
Courtesy of the artist

 

 

A crime of passion. Why not? This is my version. Many of the clues suggest that a murder has taken place, a domestic drama with a tragic end. Let us take a look at the line of breadcrumbs in the great forest, like Hansel and Gretel searching for their home, which lead us to the apparent scene of the crime, but in our case we are unfortunately too late. Allsalu knows how to control himself, how to temper light and dark and tonal scales. He knows how to express himself appropriately, how to create a composition and with a selected colour spectrum also a specific mood. This skill contains echoes of a distant memory of Estonian post-Pallas impressionism, a gentlemanly voice from the archive of our cultural memory, which demands the viewer's vision be filled with pure colour. This layer is present in Allsalu's paintings – unfortunately and ominously it is not on its own.

This gentleman has been joined by two other characters and their manners leave much to be desired. From the developing discussion in the now larger group it becomes clear that one of the newcomers carries the ecstatic and riotous burden of Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism. His innate privileges also include the right to speak in the name of Estonian art history. The so-called secret Pollock-ites can be found in abundance amidst non-conformist Estonian art of the 1960s, though their absorption into mainstream Estonian art took a little longer – around a quarter of a century – for the ideological ice of the Eastern empire to melt. In Allsalu's paintings the "secret Pollock-ite" discourse continues with a powerful carelessness, where the wide, hurried paintbrush produces surfaces of finely tuned colour. The topic of conversation is the same and the newcomer moderates it with his loud shrill voice, defines the agenda of colour with sudden brushstrokes like blows, which leave their mark on the canvas as impastoed mountains and craters. The Kaali meteorite has landed, penetrated Estonia's flat landscape and left us with centuries of food for thought.

The third key figure in this drama, inevitably heading towards the final outcome, comes from Germany, Allsalu's one-time home, and one which has understandably entered his painter's bloodstream. Yes, without any doubt – blood. Something on the canvas is seeping and dripping, something unforgiveable, something that announces that the salon-worthy criteria of post-impressionism has been abandoned and steps into the shoes of the new German "beasts" of "Bad" painting from the 80s. And these shoes step over the corpses, just as long before, these new German "beasts" – Henri Matisse and the other Fauves (French: the wild beasts) – stepped from the 19th century salons into the cataclysms of the next century. The first victim to be identified is the quality standard of impressionism and colour painting, where the paint flowing on the canvas is an accident, a mistake by the apprentice. This also applies in abstract expressionism, where the paint can freely cavort on the surface of the canvas, as long as it manages to remain within the narrative of the painter's explosive energy and bacchanalian flinging onto the canvas. Yes, this party has come to an end. Murder has been committed.

Now – the afterburn, the feeble flow of paint towards the lower edge of the canvas, submissively drifting with gravity is now comme il faut, a decadent accessory in an age that has lost its faith in the past. The afterburn, quietly smouldering in the ballroom of art history, from which the great narratives of the God-artist and his great work, which has bequeathed humanity with the ability to see colour, has just left. Vano Allsalu embodies a heroic distance, which is critical of art history and finds a place on the canvas for random streaks of colour spattered in a party spirit onto the walls and floor, as well as the dents in the chandeliers from the barrage of champagne corks.

Yes, and in addition to everything else Allsalu is in a certain sense a "post-artist", who feels uncomfortable with the social responsibility laid on painters. In his position as an artist, the moral responsibility to create an opus or a masterpiece is mixed up with his wish not to submit to the canon. Temporally he belongs to the era of barbaric, wild visuals, rushing to negate the rhetoric of high art and yet to his dilemma he still finds himself on the pages of that history. Matisse found this, so did Pollock, as did Baselitz. Now Allsalu has found it too.

 

Johannes Saar is an art historian and critic, and doctoral candidate in media studies Institute of Social Studies, Tartu University.

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