Tõnis Saadoja’s previous exhibitions have focused on the mediation and compression of memory and light perception: how to concentrate, through multiple filters, the lights within our memory.
The artist’s latest exhibition, ‘The Enduring Present’, continues in a way to examine the themes of light and time, but also executes an experimental about-face. This series is painted en plein air, meaning outdoors, in the open air, with the completion of each work being limited by the changeability of natural light within a two-hour period. As such, these paintings explore how long a moment lasts and what a single lasting moment can equate to on the canvas. In a certain sense, they are a documenting of the work of a performative artist, but in another – and more important – sense, they are a meditation on what the present means and how long it lasts; in other words, when the present is done.

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The proposition: a relatively small canvas, oil paints, an eye that looks for and finds a view of some kind and compares the colours found in nature with those on the canvas, the view itself being a composition of tree branches, tree trunks, roadsides, light – and time. What is to be achieved with all this is for that which is visible to the eye to remain on the canvas as a translation with a certain credibility. The painting renders a present moment; a specific moment of light. This means that the time in which to paint is limited due to the light changing. It is limited to the present: there can be no painting the past or leaving the painting’s completion to the future. The present here is determined by the enduring nature of both the gaze and the light: the present moment endures for as long as the light remains the same for the gaze in question. It is a present that persists in the equivalence of the gaze and the light, wherein the painting on the canvas of the very same light is a benchmark for measuring that equivalence: as long as it is possible to paint the same light one has already started painting, the present endures.

This enduring moment demands concentration. In etymological terms, the Estonian word for ‘enduring’, kestmine, shares the same root as the word for ‘centre’, kesk: to endure means ‘to be in the middle of something’, without touching its edges. For a moment to endure, to stay in the moment, requires focus.

Although there are paintings here which fill the frame or aspire to the familiar rectangular format, the scale of the image is determined for the most part not by the frame itself, but by what the eye plucks from the view as a sort of intrinsically complete motif. We do not look at these images frame by frame, after all, but along the curves of the branches, the trunks, the landscape, the glints of and chinks in the light; we look at a moment in time found in nature which focuses our gaze on its dynamics. And while the present has duration, duration itself has no frame, no edges: it is within our focused gaze. The present never really comes to an end. It endures until, at some point, it simply no longer exists, when there is a new present. But it is not
in its nature to come to an end. Similarly, a painting does not end at its edges: it has simply been completed within the duration of one and the same light.

A completed and hung painting endures in another way, whatever form that takes – it is already a trace of something which is living its own life. If the canvas was exposed to light when painted on, it will be darker in the light of the room in which it is exhibited than the view that was painted, and vice versa: if the canvas was in low light when painted on, it will later be lighter. This is the painting’s own memory of the moment of painting, of its specific proposition, of the dynamics of the painter’s gaze and the shared present of light. But it is not truly a memory or a moment of remembrance (“how it was then”). This is where the observer’s present comes into play, shaped by the light from the gallery window or exhibition space, and the desire to endure of the viewer’s gaze and their ability to focus. These images ought to be viewed repeatedly, in different lights and different moods: they are the result of a living present moment, and therefore require new durations, new presents, in order to communicate with themselves. They are not finished – they are merely done.

Accompanying text: Aare Pilv
Graphic design: Ott Metusala