FOUND VIEWS

Toomas Kaasik’s exhibition of his uniquely edited photographs, Found Views, represents the author’s most recent work.

The last exhibition by Toomas Kaasik at Haus Gallery was a retrospective view of his earlier works, which was also commemorated in an art film about the author, offering a more detailed interpretation of the photographer’s working process, something that could be rediscovered as part of this exhibition.

Although this photographic interpretation is a new one, its real starting point lies in shots that were once taken. This is Toomas Kaasik being reunited with the images he captured in the past, the rediscovered views referred to in the title of the exhibition, where emotions, moments, and memories of long ago from rolls of film have been realised in today’s compositional visions, which have been developed anew or for the first time, and combined in another conceptual environment.

Art is proof that the newest thing is not always the best, and that views of the past can also create transformations and attractive syntheses that make us curious about the past once again. Toomas Kaasik’s photographs, which are layered, picturesque, and focus on suggestive glimpses of life’s moments, captivate the viewer. Each close observation opens up new fields of consciousness to walk in, and new details in the abstract space perceived by the artist to ponder the connections between them. Kaasik’s works, which exist somewhere along the boundary between thought and reality, are at once dramatic and dreamlike, living their own interesting lives and generating contexts in the viewer of each era and space, who creates a reality influenced by their own experiential base. This is how everyone finds their own thing in Kaasik’s work – one person finds a memory of a cherished moment, another a landscape close to their soul, and yet another, a childhood favourite.

In this way, Toomas Kaasik’s exhibition offers the opportunity to pause in front of any work and analyse its meanings as well as the relationship between oneself and the world. The works in the exhibition, captured with an analog camera, challenge popular digital photography, giving emphasis to the words ‘photographic art’ in the best and most accurate sense. Toomas Kaasik, who has been exhibiting as a photographer since 1979, continues the tradition of analog photography today, having created his own personal technical style. The artist creates his work from the synthesis of several negatives, which always produces a uniquely layered result when revealed. In some ways, Kaasik’s work is more reminiscent of the printmaking tradition. Kaasik uses techniques similar to those used in the field of etching, scraping drawings onto negatives, which add both compositional and substantive meanings to the final result. The artist’s photographs are also not lacking in brush strokes, which bring colour and dynamic angles to the works. Toomas Kaasik’s photographs in the exhibition hall of Haus Gallery invite you to look, and to open up again and again to each new pair of eyes that encounters the spirit world created by the artist.

Curator: Piia Ausman

Text: Piia Ausman and Pia Pajus