Architectural Photograph with a Little Boy. Oil Painting on Canvas I

When photographed, photorealistic paintings, including Architectural Photograph with a Little Boy, retain their properties better than so-called “painterly” images. Tõnis Saadoja’s works with more complex compositions, such as Cut Images or Arrival in Paper Town, are difficult to read on reproductions and too complicated for a machine to understand. Not that the photorealistic Architectural Photograph… is a simple or easy image – even its huge format calls into question the unambiguity of any interpretation. A much smaller photograph, however, makes intimacy, which is a very important component of the painting, more accessible. It is precisely in the clash of intimacy and anonymity that the tension of the entire series lies.

Tõnis Saadoja is careful, thorough, precise and hardworking. He respects chance and emotion, but he primarily measures his and other people’s value through achievement. Sentiment blinds. Saadoja avoids its straightforwardness by emphasising in the title that it is an oil painting on canvas.

A logical, self-evident continuation of the previous sentence would be “… that is based on a photograph and depicts a little boy from decades ago”. Emphasising the temporal distance further amplifies the feeling of alienation and tension in the image due to the small size of the child and the vastness of the architecture around him. We can see a small wistful-looking child, painted so small that he almost seems to disappear; the picturesqueness of personal emotion and the fixating, photographic nature of the architecture in the background. The problem of “intermediate filters of our cognition” arises in most of Tõnis Saadoja’s paintings: the difference between the camera and the eye, the flat paper and two-dimensionality of paint on canvas; their comparability and incomparability. In the Architectural Photograph…, these are exceptionally complemented by warmth, tenderness and sadness.