2022 Me and Others

ART CENTER MÄLTINRANTA, TAMPERE

12. – 29.3.2022

TO THE PRESS

Tiedän millainen on ihminen
Se pelkää kuolemaa, mut miettii kuitenkin ensiks rahaa
Minun kanssa sinä et tartte rahaa
etkä sinä kuole

– Risto

Me and Others in the Art Center Mältinranta is the biggest solo show I have ever made and an important step in my 23-year-old career.

In my paintings there are human beings either alone or trying to have a contact with each other. I depict them experiencing their own physicality and existence in the world, the room their bodies take. On the other hand, I also describe social contacts and difficulties in them. Presented situations vary between caring and violent ones.

I don't paint heads at all or I do it very lightly because my goal is not to present other people over there - I present us here. The spectator can decide who he sees in these scenes and to whom he wants to relate. This is much easier when characters don't have faces.

I don't paint naturalistically but constructively. I want to keep my painting open to enable the spectator to see how things and people are constructed, how everything has several layers.

I get motifs from observation, fiction, dreams and imagination. It just happens. During the winter of 2021, I was painting in Paris and friends I used to know during my studies just emerged into my working space (Visitors in my Studio). From New York, I remember a couch that later got filled with terribly arrogant people (Couch II). In summer 2005, I visited the rainbow district in Paris; in 2021 people of these memories started to pose for me in the Rue des Archives, as if not a day had passed in between.

The dead and the living, memories, dreams and visions, all equally present.