A strong line in Raul Meel’s work is so-called concrete poetry—or, visual poetry, as he prefers to call it today. Meel claims to develop this creative method intuitively: driving from his sense of the beauty of language and typography. Initially, he created artworks on a typewriter, calling them “typewriter drawings”: writing down the words, which at the same time often depicted the objects they denoted, mimetically or conceptually. Later, the artist transferred these compositions into graphic techniques, such as serigraphy. With the triumph of computers, Meel began working with digital formats, which allowed him to play widely with the sensibility of fonts and arrangements of letters and words. Homage to Malevych project (2024) is one of the latest works of Meel’s visual poetry. Learning about the Ukrainian background of Kazymyr Malevych, he paid a tribute to him to express solidarity with Ukraine.
Combining letters in Ukrainian versions of Malevych’s name and names of the colors—black, red, white—of Suprematism symbols (square, cross and circle), Meel produced typographic structures that, in turn, formed squares, crosses, and circles. Carrying suggestive dynamics, they embody Malevych’s quest for transcendence, but also the author’s attempt to
decolonize his knowledge of art history.
BIOGRAPHY
Raul Meel (1941, Estonia) is a painter and graphic artist, installation and fire-performance artist, prose writer, visual and sound poet, as well as a beekeeper. He entered the Estonian art scene at the end of the 1960s as an autodidact with a background in engineering and energetics. His original artistic system roots in the conceptual synthesis of minimalist visual expression, scientific imagery and combinatorial methodology. Assembling a limited set of images in different positions, the artist achieved many options for creating a graphic composition. In the Soviet era, the display of his oeuvre faced restrictions, although he became quite known beyond the Iron Curtain. Meel’s works have been displayed within more than 600 group exhibitions and 100 solo exhibitions in Estonia and abroad.