Caress

Caress, a loving touch, both physical and mental; directed towards an other and offering oneself, giving oneself in. Caress, to give oneself up to mutual pleasure and regard. Caress, acting from one's own free will. Caress orientates processes and processes never take place except on the occasion of thought. But, what kind of thought is caress?

Understanding

What does understanding mean? Do we need to understand art? Does understanding play a role within the realm of art? As I see it, anything symbolic, for example language, cannot exhaust the depths of soul, body and mind. The phenomenon which takes place in the mind and body cannot be wholly reconstructed artificially because artistic thinking, feelings, sensations, intuition, tension, experience and thus knowledge that is innate, just to name few of the elements of artistic event, contains an indefinite multiplicity of conscious states. Understanding plays its role on a different level and in the realm of science and philosophy, it deals with readymade concepts and is woven to the past whereas art is directed towards future.

Motion

There is no mind-doing that is separate from body-doing. Physicality is an undetachable part of my thinking, my artistic process. The process captures my involvement completely my mind and my body. There is nothing that belongs to either art or thinking alone.

Incompleteness

In the course of an artistic process thoughts suggest themselves and develop as though they were inscribed into the skin of an artwork that is in the midst of becoming. Hence artistic process and thinking seems like a series of actions that an artist has to take in order to solve this inscription, in order to transmit it, to make this some thing, the inscribed, luminous. A mute conversation between an artist and an artwork. The finished work remains then what was left to be said, uttered, thought, done, when everything that can be has been. When the artwork is completed, it ties the artist’s hands for all time, it puts a stop to shared arrival but, instead, is itself an arrival. What the artist had then accomplished is a work but incompleteness achieved by incompleteness. It is the uttermost completion of the thought of incompleteness.

Absence

The power of an artwork is linked to the absence of the artist and to the thought and feelings behind the actual work. This absence is habitually covered by language produced by art theorists, aestheticians or laymen, or artists themselves. But, in language there it is nothing that communicates the actual work. The absence is complied with the most fitting words; however, the distance between the absence and the ideas, thoughts and feelings that the words try to express is something I would like to call traumatic. One’s disability to grasp and interpret them and then share them with others by language proves to be invalid. Language, working on its own level, lacks the capacity to make the invisible be seen as invisible, and not visible.

Irony

There must be an internal historicity within all the aspects of life. Irony keeps this historicity and the different paths within a roper dimension. Irony, something minute, found only in marginalia, in outskirts of all thinking. However, always within one's own mind. Irony, the play of shadows, the play of banality of life. It makes visible the distance between works, people, groups, classes, countries, climates, and genders, between thoughts of today and yesterday, between appearing and appearance.

Paradox

The tragic and banal aspects of all beginning that is actually already a middle haunt every painter. There is no beginning- poiesis is already a middle. Confusion that ideas create, the lingering mind oscillating between ideas and the eager bodily respose, however, never able to repeat what it wants to repeat. All this confusion condenced in a painting, all these layers of unsuccess, yet something new and surprising emerging. All the rules of propriety in painting - in vain.

Mind

Mind is corporeal. Touch is incorporated in the mind. Mind holds me and the world together. In the beginning I owns the mind that is nothing but it grows and intensifies in the course of time. Mind is in a constant change and I becomes an other as if opening its inside to an outside. Identities are never stable. Touch is mind's primal operator. My view is that touch creates sensibility and new thinking, flexibility and latitude in society. That is why art is necessary.

The world as a fairytale

The world of the fairytale is the complete opposite of the world of truth – and precisely for that reason so completely similar to it – just as chaos is similar to the completed creation. (Novalis)

Exhibition The Sense of Painting at Galleria Jangva, Helsinki, Finland
11.8.-28.8.2011

Subjectivity

Subjectivity - does it have a ground? How does it think about itself, how does it figure itself? Subjectivity does not have a ground, because it does not resemble anything. It figures, traces itself out of nothing. It can only show itself as a picture, a fable.

Suddenness

Art is able to bring something incomprehensible to the world. Suddenly, individual subjectivity has made an encounter with something unknown. Suddenness marks a confusion of feelings with an event that cannot be measured, not even logically, by what is already in existence. In suddenness the individual subjectivity and the external world strike violently against each other. The transcience of this sudden moment is dramatic: it cannot last, nothing remains and as Blanchot tells us, it returns to the void it illuminates.

An image of desire

Is the idea superior to the object? The idea of a painting seems always so near but at the same time also so distant from the actual action of painting. The intuitional object is never the same as the finished painting. The intuitional object is something so hard to grasp, maybe because intuition's essence is generative. It can be said that the finnished painting does express, simulate, represent, convey, symbolize something of the idea and the desire. However, what the painting precisely seems to show is the difference. Desire shows itself in a painting as the tuning of the same that is always not the same.

Sublime feeling

Sublime means something that is impressive in its grandeur - something the presentation of which coincides with infinity. But what does this grandeur mean and what does the concept of magnitude refer to? Sublime feeling is to be sought only in one's own mind. One may argue that the feeling of the sublime is a device for the deconstruction of human identity. The feeling of the sublime boundlessness stimulates one's mind, imagination is led beyond its boundaries. Once in a while, before an artwork, thinking takes action, it acts the implausible, the sublime.

As if world was designed

Kant’s proposition was that a judgement of taste contains a ground of satisfaction for everyone and that it has universal properties that we all have in common. This universality presupposes that aesthetic judgement involves a claim that everyone should agree to one’s aesthetic judgement but actually there is no verifiable proof that they will. This demand is communicative. It shows as if world was designed, it is suitable, appropriate for the humankind – world is actually smiling at us through beauty.

Appearance

Appearing is something I cannot get hold of. Appearing veils with its shine a place in cache that drapes both questions and mystery. If I look at a painting something appears, shows itself. Through this manifestation of appearing the appearance shapes conception into sensible forms that are nevertheless open and that are not given by any predefined meanings and that cannot be reduced to the painting's conceptual qualities.

The condensed moment of painting

The essence of a painting is an oscillation. Painting is neither a prescription nor an expression. Or is it just a hint of an operation of the world showing that it does not present itself as an object at all? Painting carries only borrowed elements, it resembles them but is always another. Leaping into this painting's oscillation means to me to reach a momentary presence in which I am condensed in a precise and spatial moment as withdrawn from the surface to be seen.

Stages of completion

How and what makes a painting complete? To face the dilemma: painting with it's imperfections and a painter with her lack of skill. The painting laying bare on my studio's floor demanding tirelessly to be completed. Its completion is like puzzle completed. Painting's many faces show us life as an ongoing duration, surpassing the painter and her relevance as a sole medium. A completed painting - a finite unfinity.

Words

When we talk about painting what do the words do? Do they rip off the painting making it void like killing it? The words represent only ideas and they make the painting behind them vanish. Words separate the painting from itself. I have been thinking if it is the painting that anyway demands the words, opens itself up for words, if there is a disguised connection between words and the language of painting.

Chance

Painting means an oppurtunity for a chance. Chance does not happen but through a work. Ideas tend to stiffen and make paintings more boring. One wants to get rid of any ideas as soon as possible. Ideas tend to haunt though. Usually, in the beginning, there is a vague idea of some form, colour, feeling, place and time or even of a sound or a smell. The first idea can also be some kind of collection or combination of these all. A painter does not usually know where these essences come from but it is through work that the painting really develops, and into new directions.
Painting trusts in painter and wants to show something of the reality, figure it out. Painter's task is to trust in a painting, in what Ihe/she is doing. It is then chance's role to fill the void, the gap between me, actuality and a painting, add something extra, something unknown to the painting, that excess of the reality, that is always out there.

Oscillation

Normally a painting has been excisting a long time before it has become a painting. Its excisting is oscillating in the virtual, that is like a mouth, opening and closing. It is not a matter of a fixed idea, but a matter of letting the painting happen.

Virtual

I think it was Heidegger who told that a gesture is a gathering of the bearing. I like to think that painting is a medium for this gesture. A painter is alongside the event of painting and has given his/hers body to the painting in which the gesture can write.
In a painting it is not possible to separate possible and real. Painting is a kind of proof for that. It figures itself.
The virtual opens a space that gathers at the same time, figures itself. Virtuality is always actuality.

Gestures

For a painter the painting is a container of gestures. You can think of a painting as a medium for gestures or as a threshold that opens up the gestures. Painting gives proof of gestures. What is then a gesture?