EESTI FOTOKUNSTIMESS 2014
PHOTOGRAPHIC ART FAIR 2014

Kalev Vapper

Kalev Vapper could be described best as a trickster. Above all, his work is characterised by a theatrical quality, which is evident in this series of staged photographs, yet at the same time Vapper is so elusive (his most legendary work is presenting the fact that he was graduating from Tartu Art College as his diploma work) that it seems almost impossible that he has allowed himself to be captured by the camera.

The episodic quality the collage displays have something very characteristic to the author in them. A monumental narrative – Tammsaare – meets His Holiness Estonian animation, but the everyday and prosaic situations Vapper has created, in which the battle of the titans should take place contains no intrigue. Tammsaare wrote about the eternal struggles of the ‘small men’ and so Vapper depicts Tammsaare in a similar yet peculiar situation. But as he includes no evident irony or intrigue that deviates from the original or adds a layer of meaning to it, Vapper’s fictive film stills display a sense of bewilderment often articulated by the artist.

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