MARGUS VEISVEER - Blog , Art-Historical Parallels

From Applying Paint to Directing Pigment

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:08:59 +0200

These developments are important

The history of modern painting can also be understood as a gradual transformation in the relationship between the artist, paint and the surface. What changes is not only the appearance of the painting, but the way in which the medium is allowed to act.

With Jackson Pollock, paint was no longer simply applied to the canvas with a brush. It could be dripped, poured and splashed, while the movement of the artist's body became part of the painting process. The trajectory of the paint emerged from the interaction between gesture, gravity, distance and chance. Pollock fundamentally expanded the possibilities of how paint could reach the surface.

Helen Frankenthaler moved the process further away from conventional application. In her soak-stain method, highly diluted paint was allowed to flow into and become absorbed by the unprimed canvas. The surface was no longer merely a support onto which paint was placed; it became an active participant in the formation of the image. The behavior of the liquid medium and its relationship with the fabric became central to the work.

Morris Louis developed another form of this shift. His poured and stained paintings allowed highly fluid paint to move across and through the canvas, with gravity and the physical properties of the medium playing a decisive role. Rather than constructing an image through conventional brushwork, Louis created conditions in which the paint itself could establish the structure of the painting.

Gerhard Richter introduced yet another decisive change through his use of the squeegee. Instead of building the image primarily through individual brushstrokes, he could drag, displace, mix and partially remove entire layers of paint across the surface. The squeegee became a means of transforming the behavior of the paint after it had been placed on the canvas. Control and chance could operate simultaneously: the artist initiated and directed the process, while the exact result remained partly unpredictable.

These developments are important because each of them moved painting further away from the simple model of applying paint to a surface. The artist increasingly worked with the physical behavior of the medium itself.

Directing Pigment proposes a further shift

The essential distinction is not the invention of a particular tool. A tool is only a means. It may be a brush, a blade, an elastic instrument, a specially constructed object, or something that was never intended as an artistic tool at all. What matters is not what the artist uses to move the pigment, but how the pigment is affected and how its movement is consciously directed.

In this approach, pigment is not merely applied, poured, stained or displaced. Its movement becomes the subject of active control.

The artist can influence the direction, pressure, speed, accumulation, dispersion and interaction of pigment through a sequence of deliberate movements. The process may contain unpredictability, but unpredictability is no longer simply something that happens to the painting. It becomes something the artist works with through continuous physical intervention.

This also means that Directing Pigment is not a fixed visual style. Two artists using the same principle could arrive at completely different results, because each could develop an individual way of directing pigment. The tool therefore becomes secondary to the method, and the method becomes capable of generating different artistic languages.

This distinction is particularly significant in oil painting. Oil paint has traditionally been understood primarily through its application: brushwork, layering, glazing, impasto, scraping and other established ways of placing and manipulating paint on the surface. Directing Pigment shifts the emphasis from the application of paint to the controlled movement of pigment itself.

That shift opens another field of possibilities for oil painting

"That shift opens another field of possibilities for oil painting."

It allows the medium to be investigated not only as something that carries color, but as a physical material whose movement, distribution and structure can be deliberately shaped. The resulting optical effects can move beyond what conventional application-based oil painting normally produces, creating new relationships between transparency, density, diffusion, surface and light.

In this sense, Directing Pigment is not proposed as another individual technique within the existing vocabulary of painting. It is proposed as an open method: a principle that other artists could interpret through their own tools, movements and intentions.

The tool does not define the method. The artist's relationship with the movement of pigment does.

Beyond the Intermediate: Can Painting Move Beyond Modernism?

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 07:53:30 +0200

Perhaps it needs another condition

There is a strange moment in the history of painting when one begins to wonder whether painting has already passed through too many lives. It has been academic, romantic, impressionist, expressionist, abstract, conceptual, deconstructed, revived and repeatedly declared dead. Yet somehow, it keeps returning to the canvas. So what is left for painting to do?

Perhaps the answer is not to invent another style, but to change the conditions under which a painting comes into being.

For me, this question has gradually become more important than the question of style itself. I work with oil paint, a medium burdened with an enormous history. It carries the memory of landscape, portraiture, light and illusion. It carries Monet, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and countless others who have already pushed it in directions that once seemed impossible. Yet the medium itself has not necessarily exhausted its possibilities. Perhaps we have simply been looking at it from the same side.

There is an interesting gap between what we call modern painting and what we call contemporary art. Modernism transformed the visual language of painting, gradually separating colour from description, surface from illusion, gesture from representation. Later, contemporary art often moved further away from painting itself, allowing the idea, process or context surrounding an artwork to become more important than the painted image. Somewhere between these worlds lies a peculiar territory: painting knows everything that happened before it, but no longer has to behave according to the rules established by any of those periods.

This is where I find myself increasingly interested - not in leaving painting behind, but in asking whether painting can pass through its own history without remaining trapped inside it.

Traditionally, we tend to think of a painting as something that depicts something. A landscape depicts a landscape. An abstract painting may depict nothing recognisable, but still presents itself as a finished composition. But what if the visible image is only one temporary condition of the painting? What if colour, gesture, light, surface and time are not simply tools used to produce an image, but forces that produce the image themselves?

This changes the position of the artist. The artist does not necessarily apply paint in order to construct a predetermined picture. The artist can create conditions in which pigment is directed, interrupted, accumulated, displaced and allowed to form relationships that could not have been completely predicted beforehand. The painter becomes less of an illustrator of an idea and more of a director of a process. The writer directs a flow of words. The artist directs a flow of pigment. What finally appears on the canvas is the consequence of that direction.

This does not mean surrendering control. Quite the opposite. The more open the process becomes, the more precisely the artist has to understand when to intervene. A mark can destroy a balance. Another layer can make a surface meaningless. One vertical interruption can suddenly change the spatial logic of an entire painting. At a certain point, the artist is no longer simply adding. The artist is deciding what must not be added.

This is where time becomes part of the work. A painting may appear finished while still containing a possibility for another movement. A surface may change under different light, in a different space or from a different distance. The painting therefore has no single, absolute appearance. It has conditions. Perhaps this is one of the places where painting can move beyond some of the assumptions inherited from modernism - not by becoming more complicated, but by becoming less fixed.

This is one reason the idea of Collapse has become important in my recent work. Collapse does not necessarily mean destruction. It can also mean the moment when an existing structure stops being sufficient. After a collapse, something may disappear, but something else becomes possible precisely because the previous structure is no longer holding everything in place.

After Collapse therefore does not have to be understood as a painting of catastrophe. It can be understood as a painting that exists after the collapse of a particular way of seeing. The landscape may still be there. Colour may still be there. The marks, surfaces and spatial suggestions may still refer to things we recognise. But the relationship between them has changed. The painting does not necessarily tell us what happened. It asks what kind of image is possible afterwards.

I have used the term Teleexpressionism to describe part of this territory. But perhaps it is misleading to think of it simply as another artistic style. A style usually tells us what something looks like. I am increasingly interested in something that describes how an image moves through time, context and perception. A form can belong to one reality and appear in another. A landscape can contain the memory of a landscape that no longer exists. An object can become a sign, a sign can become a visual disturbance, and a disturbance can become the beginning of a new spatial order.

The painting is then not simply representing a place or an object. It is transposing visual information between different conditions. Perhaps this is why the paintings can sometimes feel recognisable and unfamiliar at the same time. They are not intended to be surreal. They are not necessarily abstract either. They occupy an unstable position between recognition and transformation.

There is, of course, a danger here. If a painting requires too much explanation, something may have gone wrong. A work should not depend on the artist standing beside it and providing the missing instructions. At the same time, I do not believe that every painting needs to be immediately understood. There is a difference between not understanding something and having nothing to discover. The first can be productive; the second is simply empty.

I am more interested in the moment when a viewer recognises something - a colour, a space, a structure, perhaps even a landscape - and then realises that recognition is not enough. Something remains unresolved. The painting continues after the first impression. Perhaps this is where contemporary painting still has an enormous possibility: not in making itself easier to understand, nor in making itself more obscure, but in creating a situation in which understanding can remain incomplete.

I do not think painting needs to escape its history. Nor do I think it is useful to claim that one has simply jumped over modernism, postmodernism or everything that came before. There are no clean jumps in art. There are connections, detours, pauses and unexpected returns. A painting may carry traces of Impressionism without being Impressionist. It may carry the freedom of abstraction without becoming abstract. It may use conceptual thinking without ceasing to be a painting. It may even carry the memory of older forms while pointing towards something that has not yet acquired a name.

Perhaps this is the real journey: not a flight from the past, but a movement through it without permanently landing anywhere.

And perhaps painting does not need another revolution. Perhaps it needs another condition.

A different relationship between pigment and image. Between control and emergence. Between what is seen and what is remembered. Between the painting as an object and the painting as an event. I do not know whether this is a new direction for painting. I would rather leave that question open.

But if painting can still move through its history, carry all of it with it, and nevertheless arrive somewhere that does not quite belong to any of the places it has already visited - then perhaps the journey is not over yet.

Painting Time: David Hockney's Winter Timber and the Timeline Series

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 07:43:26 +0200

The representation of time

A painting occupies space. It is static, fixed, and visible all at once. Yet our experience of the world is neither static nor instantaneous. We move through landscapes, memories overlap, events unfold, and perception itself develops through time. For this reason, many artists have searched for ways to move beyond the idea of painting as a frozen moment. Among contemporary painters, David Hockney has explored this question extensively. His painting Winter Timber provides an interesting point of comparison with my own Timeline series because both bodies of work challenge the traditional notion of a single captured instant. Yet they do so in fundamentally different ways.

Hockney: Time Through Movement

At first glance, Winter Timber appears to be a winter landscape. Bare trees stand against a pale sky, a path curves through the snow, and brightly coloured trunks punctuate the composition.

However, the painting is not primarily concerned with describing a specific place.

Hockney has often questioned the limitations of photographic vision. A photograph captures a fraction of a second from a single viewpoint, but human perception operates differently. We scan, move, remember, compare, and continuously reconstruct our surroundings.

In Winter Timber, the viewer's eye travels through the painting much as a person walks through the landscape itself. The path becomes a visual guide, leading us forward. The coloured trees function almost as markers along a journey. Rather than presenting one fixed moment, the painting accumulates multiple moments of looking.

Time enters the work through movement.

The viewer experiences the landscape sequentially, constructing it through attention and observation.

In this sense, Hockney transforms space into an experience of duration.

Figure 1. David Hockney, Winter Timber. Screenshot from the History of Art Facebook page.

The Timeline Series: Time as Structure

The Timeline series begins from a different premise.

Instead of extending a moment through movement, the work collapses multiple moments into a single image.

Events, fragments, memories, and temporal layers coexist simultaneously. The painting is not organised around a journey through space but around the interaction of different moments in time.

Where Hockney's viewer progresses through a landscape, the viewer of a Timeline painting encounters several temporal realities at once.

The image does not unfold chronologically.

Past and present become visible together.

The work therefore asks a different question.

Not: How do we move through time?

But rather: What happens when multiple moments occupy the same visual field?

This shift changes the role of the viewer. Instead of following a path, the viewer navigates a network of temporal relationships.

Beyond Representation

Perhaps the most significant distinction lies in the role that time plays within the image.

In Hockney's work, time is a consequence of perception. We experience duration because we move through the painting.

In the Timeline series, time becomes part of the painting's structure itself.

The image is not depicting a moment in time.

Nor is it depicting a sequence of moments.

Instead, it presents time as a spatial condition, where different temporal states coexist and interact within a single visual field.

This approach shifts painting away from representation and toward reconstruction.

The painting no longer asks the viewer to witness an event.

It asks the viewer to assemble relationships between events.

Time Out, 2026

David Hockney's Winter Timber demonstrates how painting can escape the limitations of the photographic moment by incorporating movement, duration, and the experience of looking. The Timeline series pursues the same challenge from another direction. Rather than extending a moment through space, it brings multiple moments together within a single image. The result is not a journey through time, but a meeting point of times. In Hockney's work, time flows.

In the Timeline series, time intersects. And it is within those intersections that the image begins to reveal realities that cannot be seen from any single moment alone.

Poetry Poster Series

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:33:18 +0100

Art-Historical Assessment of Margus Veisveer’s Poetry Poster Series (1987)

Margus Veisveer’s 1987 poster series created at the Tartu Art School-based on the haiku poetry of Andres Ehin-marks a significant and previously underdocumented turn in the development of Estonian poster art. It stands as one of the earliest known instances in Estonia where poetry appears not as an illustration, caption, or supplementary motif, but as the central visual and conceptual core of the poster itself. In this sense, Veisveer’s work departs clearly from the dominant poster traditions of the era and aligns more closely with contemporary conceptual design practices.

Position Within Estonian Poster Art

During the late 1980s, Estonian poster art was shaped by two main currents:

functional or commissioned posters for cultural and public events, and
artist-driven posters, often linked to exhibitions, concerts, or film.

Veisveer’s project belongs to neither category.

It does not advertise an event nor illustrate a literary text. Instead, it transforms the poem itself into a self-sufficient poster. At that time in Estonia, such an approach simply did not exist.

Although the 1970s–1980s saw important developments in visual poetry and text-based conceptual art (such as works by Raul Meel or, in a literary dimension, Andres Ehin himself), a cohesive series of poetry posters as an autonomous artistic form was absent. Veisveer’s diploma project fills this historical gap.

Margus Veisveer’s Poetry Poster. "This frozen lake speaks nothing of the real sky." by A. Ehin.

Connection to Conceptual and Minimalist Traditions

The posters draw directly from the aesthetic logic of haiku: economy of language, sensitivity to space, and intentional restraint. Veisveer translates these principles into a visual structure that blends minimalist design with poetic rhythm.

Characteristic features include:

deliberate use of empty space as a compositional force,
typography that determines the entire visual balance,
a muted and atmospheric color palette that supports the mood of the poem,
an avoidance of illustration in favor of textual presence.

These qualities place Veisveer’s work in dialogue with the Baltic graphic design avant-garde of the late 1980s, though Estonia had seen very few text-centred posters of this nature.

Exhibition in Moscow in 1989

Historical Significance and International Context

The fact that six posters from the series were selected for an international poster exhibition in Moscow in 1989 highlights both their artistic merit and their conceptual distinctiveness. During the perestroika period, juries increasingly favored experimental, minimalist, and text-driven works-precisely the qualities embodied in this series.

That most posters have not survived, nor were they widely documented, reflects a broader pattern of late-Soviet experimental artworks: they circulated in exhibitions but often fell outside institutional archiving systems.

However, even from the surviving photographs and textual accounts, the historical importance is clear:

Veisveer’s project can be regarded as the first systematically executed poetry poster series in Estonia.

Veisveer’s 1987 diploma series represents an early and singular example of text-centred authorship in Estonian poster design, preceding several text-driven visual trends that would emerge in the 1990s.

Its significance lies in:

being the earliest known cohesive poetry poster series in Estonia;
merging graphic design and poetry in a formally innovative way;
demonstrating the experimental spirit of the Tartu Art School in the late Soviet period;
contributing to the broader modernization of Estonian visual culture on the eve of political transition.

Had the entire series been preserved, it would likely hold a place among the canonical works of Estonian graphic design from the late 20th century. Even in fragmentary form, it stands out as a historically important and pioneering project.

Margus Veisveer - Poetry Posters (1987)

Posters based on haiku by Andres Ehin, Tartu Art School Diploma Series

Margus Veisveer’s 1987 poster series, created in dialogue with the haiku poetry of Andres Ehin, stands as one of the earliest known examples in Estonia where poetry itself becomes the primary visual subject of the poster. Rather than illustrating the text, Veisveer integrates the poem into the very structure of the image, allowing typography, spacing, and rhythm to carry the expressive weight traditionally assigned to graphics.

Each poster presents a single haiku, suspended within a restrained minimalist composition. The subtle tonal fields, the measured balance of empty space, and the deliberate calm of the design echo the essential qualities of haiku—brevity, clarity, and contemplative stillness. In these works, the poem is not merely placed onto the picture surface; it is the composition.

Created on the eve of major cultural and political transformations in Estonia, the series reflects a moment when graphic design was opening itself to conceptual experimentation. Veisveer’s approach diverges from the dominant poster traditions of the period and aligns instead with emerging text-based visual practices. It is no coincidence that six works from the series were selected for exhibition at the International Poster Exhibition in Moscow in 1989, where their quiet precision and conceptual directness stood out.

Although many of the posters have not survived, the significance of the series is clear: Veisveer’s project represents a pioneering step in Estonian visual culture, expanding the boundaries of what a poster could be. By giving poetry the status of image, he created a body of work that remains both historically singular and artistically resonant.

Parallels to 2 sec

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 10:06:32 +0100

Art-Theoretical Parallels to 2 sec (shut down) (2025)

Margus Veisveer’s 2 sec (shut down) occupies a unique position within contemporary painting, merging geometric abstraction, atmospheric nature, and post-digital conceptual thinking. The painting does not directly reference any specific predecessor, yet several art-historical trajectories resonate with its visual logic and philosophical undertones.

1. Kazimir Malevich – geometric rupture as zero-state

Malevich’s Black Square marked a radical break-a visual shutdown of representational reality.

Veisveer recontextualises the square within nature, transforming it from a metaphysical void into an intrusive force, prompting questions about who initiates the shutdown: nature, technology, or humanity.

Parallel: the black form as absolute limit.

Difference: Malevich’s square exists outside the world; Veisveer inserts it into the world.

2. Barnett Newman - the line as existential threshold

Newman’s zip acts as a metaphysical division within a field.

Veisveer’s horizontal white line functions similarly but operates as a temporal and technological signal: the instant before shutdown.

Parallel: the line as boundary.

Difference: Newman avoids narrative, ecology, and technological reference.

3. Mark Rothko - inner luminosity within darkness

Rothko’s fields radiate inward-facing, psychological light.

Veisveer’s glowing core echoes this but anchors it in the temporal logic of a system approaching collapse.

Parallel: light as existential intensity.

Difference: Rothko’s light is timeless; Veisveer’s is tensioned by imminence.

4. Olafur Eliasson - artificial light in atmospheric nature

Eliasson merges technological light with natural perception to create hybrid sensory spaces.

Veisveer compresses this dynamic into a single painted frame where nature and technological interruption coexist.

Parallel: interference between the natural and artificial.

Difference: Eliasson works spatially; Veisveer compresses the concept into image.

5. Anish Kapoor - black forms as sites of absorption

Kapoor’s black voids consume space and diminish visibility.

Veisveer’s square similarly interrupts and absorbs-but allows light to break through.

Parallel: the black form as gravitational centre.

Difference: Veisveer assigns narrative meaning (shutdown, transition).

6. Hiroshi Sugimoto - the horizon as existential zero-line

Sugimoto’s Seascapes depict the horizon as an eternal constant.

Veisveer adopts this archetype only to disrupt it with geometric intrusion and technological light.

Parallel: the sea as primordial order.

Difference: Sugimoto preserves continuity; Veisveer fractures it.

Conclusion

2 sec (shut down) stands not as a continuation but as a convergence of:

Malevich’s radical abstraction,
Newman’s thresholds,
Rothko’s inner light,
Eliasson’s post-digital atmospheres,
Kapoor’s void-forms,
and Sugimoto’s metaphysical horizon.

From this convergence emerges an image that is unprecedented-an existential moment suspended between disappearance, transformation, and reconnection.
Veisveer constructs a visual logic that belongs distinctly to the post-digital present yet remains timeless in its philosophical reach.