He started his career as a painter with powerful roadside exhibitions (1995-2006), displaying gigantic monumental paintings on the Pärnu-Tõstamaa highway. He has graduated from the Academia Grata, a college formed by the Pärnu Sütevaka Department of Art and the Estonian Academy of Arts, and has been a lecturer in both Academia Grata and Academia Non Grata. Joonas has also been a member of the performance art group Non Grata (1998-2007).
In 2000 he executed a conceptual act by ceasing to present his CV in order to prove that he is an artist. Aledoia is a word from the artist’s own mythology that initially stood for a series of flower paintings, but later extended to the whole body of art. Joonas is definitely one of the Estonian artists who most powerfully cultivate the mystical and romantic myth of an artist. His life includes epiphanous moments of inspiration, tumultuous decisions, works burned in fits of depression, and pictures painted from visions. His tender and obscene performances have brought fourth both great admiration and also scandals that end in court cases. His short summary of his creative process is: break the illusionary reality and follow your inspiration, it is the only chance to find ourselves inside this illusion; losing one’s way from time to time is an inevitable part of the journey. Joonas’s artistic language has evolved into extreme idiosyncrasy and makes it difficult to place him in formal canons due to the lack of direct role models in his creative path. This has not bothered him – for Joonas, that is a natural process.
His creative travels can be described as contemporary mysticism – especially in the light of developments in recent years – where the synthesis of irony and different types of art and cultures provides a strong energetic boost; where the extremely expressive, often excessive diversity is glued together by the artist who does not need mediators between himself and cosmos.
He has entered the art world as an outsider and an independent thinker and has also asserted himself as such, walking a totally idiosyncratic path like an icebreaker on a frozen sea, carving completely new routes. He has performed in many European countries, the U.S. and Russia.
Works by Joonas in collections: KUMU, Tartu Art Museum, the Museum of New Art in Pärnu, the City of Pärnu, and in many private collections in Estonia and Europe.