Jaan Toomik – People and Other Creatures

Mostra personale.

Comunicato stampa

Jann Toomik is one of the best known Estonian international artists, probably the best known. His artwork embraces diverse disciplines such as painting, performance art, video art, and film direction. The core of his poetics is “a metaphysical, biocentric and shamanic vision of the world”. His work, for the most part naturalistic and autobiographical, is focused on the age-old subjects of life and death, religion and spirituality, that bind the human body to the cyclic processes of nature.
While researching Toomik’s work it occurred to me that it seemed like a journey not unlike that of Dante, who rises from Inferno toward Paradise. A journey that represents the life path of every human being. It is an autobiographical journey in which we can recognize everyone, and which leads us to look into our intimacy, into the depths of our souls, into the dark forest in which we have lost ourselves and in which we feel alone in the search for a guide, in the search for the other. We recognize everyone in the Dante who wishes to climb the shining hill alone. But it is in sociality, thanks to relationships and to the collaboration and help of others, that we are able to climb the hill.
After the first Italian retrospective dedicated to the Estonian artist and produced in collaboration with the The Center for Contemporary Art of Estonia in Tallin, Jaan Toomik returns with a new oeuvre that includes a piece of sculpture, some videos and a series of paintings created ad hoc for the exhibition. The human being remains central, personified by Toomik himself who is able to be, in an original and personal way, both subject and precarious object, post-modern and globalized, without ever losing his playfulness and self-irony.