Layer by Layer

Exhibition text from the 2016 Layer by Layer- exhibition, Gallery G12, Kuopio:

The motifs of the paintings in my exhibition, both representational and abstract, represent the “unknown”, I don’t know exactly what they mean. I did an experiment where I drew anything for a while
in the morning during the first fifteen minutes of waking; in this way, a collection of abstractions and the presented motifs were born – the starting point for painting, which then required a lot of conscious work to end up as paintings. My theme is layering in both sculptures and paintings, as well as in the motifs. I have largely built up the visuality of the paintings with thin translucent shades of color in superimposed layers, when looking at the work they mix optically. The color sculptures consist of overlapping sedimentary levels and a painting surface that comments on their shapes. My sculpture series is bookshelf-sized miniature mountain landscapes in a serial format. Spatiality and landscape are permanently important to me, as are the references to several stylistic periods in art history visible in the paintings. A sculpture as an object is here-present, a painting always seems to refer to an elsewhere-place or space, even time. The motifs of my works are not narrative, but you can imagine a story around them. The painting art of the Baroque era, which I admire, often presented the highlight of the event, perhaps these do that too, so what happened before or after the painting situation? The brush strokes are more prominent in the paintings of this series than in my works of the last decade, often supporting form, movement, airiness or the structure of space. Glazing, i.e. layer painting, pulls some parts of the painting away and brings others more into the foreground. Variations in color opacity are part of the drama of the painting. Glazing as a way of working is challenging, sometimes unpredictable in its outcome and often requires repairs. The subjects of my exhibition at G12 are scattered images produced by my brain, remnants of dreams, seeing with closed eyes, images between the retina and the cerebral cortex, views of the state of consciousness after waking up. Cultural influences guide the initial images into more representative views of our needs according to, or simplify into forms where the structure looks at itself. In glazes, what is behind and what is in front is also interesting in terms of painting. What seems to be further away is sometimes actually closer. When looking at transparent layers of color, the photons bounce through the layers before reaching the retina, and when side-by-those surfaces are still translucent in different ways, the number of observations that appear to the viewer as an image is dizzyingly large. So the viewer is always skilled, even without realizing it. (2016)