Tamara Luuk

Curator's foreword

Pärn, like life itself, cannot be broken down into pieces

Everything that Priit Pärn does or experiences forms not just a web of connections, but a strikingly coherent whole which embraces, and at times presupposes, ideas and actions that contradict the common sense and conventional behaviour. It is rare to encounter a person in whom emotional sensitivity, analytical acuity, and life wisdom are directly combined, and whose lived intensity is consciously and effectively turned inside out in his creative work. In the early years of our acquaintance, I believed that Pärn’s relentlessly playful, life-dispersing art functioned as a counterweight to the grounded care of his everyday life. In the early 1990s, the domestic harmony such as that in the Pärn household was something seldom found among friends and acquaintances, many of whose marriages were falling apart. “Family is most important; making art comes alongside it,”¹ Pärn says, claiming as his own a stance more commonly regarded as feminine.

A passionate observer of beauty, an ardent cook and gourmand, a keen watcher of the world and a lover of thought experiments, an embodiment of vital force and a perceptive admirer of the boundless foolishness of humankind, Priit Pärn speaks through his work of a quietly wise principle underlying the order of the world: one fool creates chaos; two fools restore balance. The open proclamation of grand emotions – beauty, longing, devotion of the kind found in soap operas, all too easily sounds hollow. The core of truth, love, or self-sacrifice reveals itself more readily when expressed through its opposite, or even its negation. In this sense, Pärn’s art is entirely lucid. The “ugliness” often ascribed to the characters in his films and drawings can hardly be taken at face value – because what, after all, could a truly “beautiful” character represent? Pärn himself notes, with characteristic modesty: “I do not place much faith in the immutability of the laws of beauty.”²

Alongside its richness of detail and references, the work that emerges from the movements of Priit Pärn’s mind and hand never loses sight of the artistic whole, nor of a precise and telling punchline – whether realised in an image, a book, or a film. This notion of wholeness also shapes his view of other artists, whose work he considers in its full, all-encompassing totality: “Many artists produce the occasional strong work, but when their oeuvre is considered as a whole, the picture becomes less convincing. I value, in their entirety, the work of painters P. Mudist, T. Pääsuke, and O. Maran; graphic artists S. Liiva, M. Mutsu, and P. Ulas; and the sculptor Ü. Õun. There are many more artists whose individual works I admire, but I will not name them here.”³

If we take this line of thought further, it becomes clear that not only across different media, but even within a single one – film – the roles of scriptwriter, director, and artist remain distinct, yet must ultimately converge. The highest level of mastery lies in fusing screenplay, drawing, and individual frames so that each retains its own strength and remains compelling even when taken on its own: “In 1895, I tried to approach things differently – the whole emerged only through the interplay of image and text. If you read the text on its own, it might even seem tragic: someone struggling with their identity, and so on. But when combined with absurd visuals, their juxtaposition creates a kind of third level. This was not easy. When writing the text, there comes a moment when you realise: I’m starting to describe what is happening. Then you have to slap your own fingers … remind yourself that the text must remain independent. I never thought very highly of my abilities as a writer.”⁴

What Priit Pärn himself calls the “third level” is described by Hasso Krull, in his discussion of Pärn’s use of reversal (with reference to the book Tagurpidi (Backwards, 1980) – T. L.), as follows: “By now I have come to understand that what is being created here is a kind of primary – or proto-rhythmic – model of a mythical world, one that is at once very simple and fundamentally generative. /—/ Such a basic pattern, a pattern of inversion, /—/ offers a clue as to how mythical narratives might be approached more broadly: through the expansive possibilities of virtuality. /—/ It carries a certain charge, perhaps one that endures for a lifetime. /—/ It is precisely through contrast that the workings of these cultural mechanisms become visible.”⁵

Priit Pärn explains it more simply: “At a certain stage in life, a person learns to read drawings, images. /—/ I began as a caricaturist, /—/ this requires a certain kind of thinking and construction. /—/ If someone is skilled at inventing things, then /—/ I can make use of these perceptions of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface.”⁶

A self-taught artist with a background in biology, Pärn has created caricatures, films, book illustrations, prints, and charcoal drawings; he has written screenplays and books. He has taught, practised sport, lived fully, and loved. All of it is intertwined – an indivisible whole, full of contradictions, and in each of these domains, remarkably accomplished.

One World, One Pärn, Many Films⁷

Alongside the fourteen longer animated films that have secured his place in film history, Priit Pärn has created screenplays, stories, and images that stand as independent works of art and literature. Yet it is in film that the trajectory of his thinking is most clearly revealed. Pärn’s largest exhibition of drawings in his home country was undoubtedly the show on the fifth floor of the newly opened Kumu Art Museum. In the accompanying catalogue, Andreas Trossek offers a thorough overview of Pärn’s work up to 2007. Although the exhibition was devoted to drawings, Trossek cannot avoid addressing that of which the drawings form only a part – Pärn’s oeuvre as a whole. Accordingly, his text quite naturally extends to animation. Likewise, the exhibition’s curator, Eha Komissarov, cannot bypass Pärn’s work as a filmmaker.

If anything, the artist Priit Pärn – whose drawings fill the exhibition spaces of the Kumu Art Museum – would, first and foremost, want to know how the aesthetic qualities of the works on display are perceived: the movement of the line, the interplay of light and shadow, the composition – in short, everything that art-historical analysis is meant to bring to light. Only in the final instance – for “my images do not mean anything; they are simply what they are,”⁸ as Pärn puts it – should one turn to the question of what is actually depicted.

Paradoxically, Eha Komissarov characterises Priit Pärn’s graphic work precisely in terms of plot and narrative – elements rooted in his experience of film – pointing to the artist’s powerful drive to tell stories and his rapid, dynamic handling of subject matter. She notes that in Estonia there are roughly a thousand graphic artists from different generations, many of them highly accomplished, yet no one creates quite like Pärn. And although she adds that without a formal training, Pärn’s greatest advantage – perhaps the most valuable condition in contemporary art – is his absolute freedom,⁹ her account ultimately suggests something else: that art historians lack the criteria, the will, and even the language to adequately analyse his images. Young Andreas Trossek, quite naturally and justifiably, observes that “this man has always done what he wanted and makes absolutely no distinction between the media he uses”¹⁰ … and, in essence, arrives at the same conclusion.

Now, nearly twenty years later, one must acknowledge that Priit Pärn’s images remain fresh and forceful in their seemingly casual, chance-embracing looseness; strikingly “right” in the fluid interplay between detail and whole; and fully capable of standing on their own, even independent of narrative. One cannot help but observe that an art historian, trained within the discipline of art history, depends on temporal distance – something the artist does not require when creating an image. And not only the art historian. In his meticulously compiled book Pärnograafia (Pärnography, 2006), Toomas Kall makes a similar point regarding the reception of Pärn’s caricatures: “A more attentive society would have recognised that many of Pärn’s earlier caricatures convey, in at least as witty a form, an equally significant message (compared to the singularly noticed and much-hyped Sitta kah! (I Don’t Give a Shit!) – T. L.). This means they would have deserved at least as much social resonance. It is not Pärn’s fault that, before 1987, we did not have such a society.”¹¹

Boletus

Priit Pärn’s characters move freely between films and images, reappearing in his book texts and illustrations. He quotes constantly – both others and himself – and does so with striking openness and generosity. Specialists have compared his work to that of Luis Buñuel, Jan Švankmajer, Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Ülo Sooster, René Magritte, and Otto Dix, and, more broadly, to movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and Postmodernism. Yet anyone drawing such parallels must ultimately concede that Pärn cannot be reduced to any of these influences – he remains unmistakably himself.¹²

Experts from the fields of film, image, and text each approach Priit Pärn’s “multifunctionality” from their own disciplinary perspective.¹³ Let us do the same – and note with admiration that, as in his other fields of activity, Pärn also identifies and masterfully exploits the unique specificity of drawing as a medium. The exhibition Boletus presents charcoal drawings from the years 1984–2005, along with one work dated 2026. It also includes previously unexhibited, entirely abstract works that depict neither narrative nor recognisable subject matter, as well as others in which subtle gradations of light and shadow – and the at times barely perceptible presence of figures – reveal the artist’s imagery in a kind of anthropomorphic fluidity, approaching abstraction.

Naturally, the exhibition also presents highlights from Priit Pärn’s peak period of drawing in the early 1990s, in which his key criterion for a “good” image – “tension”¹⁴ – manifests itself in the dynamic interplay of a creative pair: man and woman. A similar field of force – feminine and masculine, mutually complementary, continuously attracting and repelling – runs through many of Pärn’s films. The animated works Eine murul (Breakfast on the Grass, 1987) and Hotell E (Hotel E, 1992) – to which Pärn also adds Kolmnurk (Triangle)¹⁵ – are exceptional in this respect: expansive, almost novelistic animations with an epic scope comparable to feature films. Although populated by characters of both sexes, these figures do not form the films’ central focus. One need only recall the dedication “to artists who did everything they were allowed to do” in Eine murul¹⁶, or the tension of existing between two worlds in Hotell E.¹⁷ Later, as Estonia became integrated into the West, these broader societal observations receded, giving way to an increasingly dominant epic of human relationships – less raw and forceful than before, yet ever more inventive and refined in its formal expression.

With the drawings, however, the situation is reversed. They do not attain the quiet tenderness or sense of longing found in the films created in collaboration with Olga Pärn, such as Elu ilma Gabriella Ferrita (Life Without Gabriella Ferri, 2008) or Tuukrid vihmas (Divers in the Rain, 2010). Nor do they reach the breathtaking beauty of movement, landscape, and atmosphere achieved through techniques such as sand animation or motion capture in films like Lendurid koduteel (Pilots on the Way Home, 2014) or Luna Rossa (2024).

In the drawings – predominantly from the 1990s, works that no longer need to be framed within either the Soviet period or the era of wild transition – Priit Pärn’s life-driven characters and his coarsely sensitive aesthetic resonate with striking clarity; one might say that time has worked in their favour. What Pärn once described as the total freedom of his drawings now appears, more than ever, as the artist’s freedom to define his art on his own terms. Freed from their Soviet-era context, these drawings are also shielded from the pressures of contemporary political correctness¹⁸ by the buffer of temporal distance – a distance that proves far less protective in the case of Pärn’s films created in the new century. The remarkable artistic solutions and formal inventiveness of these later works do not fully insulate them from the vigilance of present-day moral scrutiny. With his acute social instinct, Pärn is well aware of this and seeks, at times, to meet society halfway – for otherwise he would risk being indiscriminately condemned on each front. He is not wrong: there is little to be gained from provoking the best possible time in which we live – even if its political correctness can flatten one’s wings, like a steamroller running over Pablo Picasso’s artist’s hand in the final frames of Eine murul.

Soon, Priit Pärn’s all-ages book Puravik loomaaias (Boletus at the Zoo, 2026) will be published; its title has also lent its name to the exhibition at the Tallinn Art Hall. Like a collection of short stories that gradually cohere into a gently, intelligently, and wittily argued short novel, it forms a unified narrative centred on the desire for freedom. Boletus contains both Pärn’s characteristic humour and his direct, benevolent candour, yet it lacks the epic-tragic dimension of the films from his “dark animation” period. The same holds true for his two unproduced feature-length screenplays, Vääramatu jõud (Force Majeure, written in 2001; selected among the twelve best screenplays at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2002) and Rahvuspark (National Park, 2000), which sketch portraits of figures navigating the transitional era – marked by everyday criminality and a stark, psychologically stripped-down reality. This is our past, and we recognise ourselves in it. We laugh; we do not take offence, because we sense that the return of these characters is no longer truly possible today. Although…

The earliest drawing in the exhibition, dating from 1984, stands apart from the others – free of coarseness and of intellectual play. In this small charcoal work, one finds a simple, dreamlike, unsentimental, and not yet self-aware form of love, akin to that in the short animation based on Jüri Üdi’s poem Ma kuklas tunnen eluaegset kuuli (I Feel a Lifelong Bullet in the Back of My Head, Olga Pärn and Priit Pärn, 2007). It is the kind of love most delicately expressed in Pärn’s films Elu ilma Gabriella Ferrita and Tuukrid vihmas – films that unfold slowly, telling gently melancholic stories of loss and discovery. Fragments of the adult world cut through these narratives with a certain cruelty, and their endings are sad – like life itself, which we think we understand. And although the storytelling capacity of a two-dimensional image is limited, Pärn’s most recent charcoal drawing, Suur minek (The Great Departure, 2026), offers a striking image: a long line of his characters marching out of the picture in a kind of procession.

… … 2005

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2005