Syncope
Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki
Spring 2020
I'd like to stop forgetting. Between
the working hours a cloud accumulates. When the cloud rains down,
trying to funnel all that into one painting at a time leads into a
flood. After it recedes, the resulting image is a distant dream of
that cloud, dried up and broken. Through working I keep losing
dreams, but also materializing something I couldn't predict. This
process is molting, tricking mind to avoid the beaten path. Memory is
both torn asunder and united again on canvas. It's rare to achieve
something from that cloud of dreams, instead my work consists of odd,
broken images.
But each painting, even the odd ones,
have their place in the bigger picture, my lifelong family tree of
images. Each of them irreplaceable. Painting is an attempt to catch
that fleeting cloud, to fight back forgetting. And to be completely
drained in the process. It's like I'm stumbling forward, through the
walls, against the wind, using all my energy to make mistakes to
learn from them, like a fool spiralling up and down.
The possibilities of the
painting are overwhelming in the beginning. To finish a painting is
the greatest satisfaction. But by then a lot has been lost both as
the torn off layers and as forgotten images. Each finished painting
has a history of cuts invisible to the audience. What you see as a
static image is a cut to a stream for me. Thematically the sense of
oblivion and absence are in the center of my work too. It's the
forgetting of names, meanings and habits. A momentary loss of
consciousness, a sudden reboot after an overflow, a confusing but
purifying restart. Nature is abstract and nameless, it doesn't
represent anything. Maybe you can see a face on an abstract form, but
can you see the abstract behind your own face?
I paint quite fast trying
to keep up with the momentary images and often end up making drastic
changes to the work at hand. Sometimes it's simply because of my
impatience and frustration but often it's because of a learned
mechanism. I believe that to become a good painter I have to be ready
to let go of both good and bad. This kind of thinking leads into
images where all the remaining forms have gone through a rigorous
process of testing if they really work, if they are real and right.
Even things that I've worked on for hours have to go through the test
and sometimes be destroyed. I have to make sure it's right because it
might be my last painting. I want to get it right when I still have
the chance. But in the end I can't rest in any certainty or trust in
my knowledge or perception. I'm to rely on the fact that I can't keep
up with the fluid reality, I can only produce images that are
imperfect and always lagging behind my senses. From longing to
exhaustion, all that is left after the painting is finished is just
an image, an attempt.
The human being in my
paintings is not just a part of nature and animal kingdom but also a
part of the natural cycle. If there is emotion, it's ecstasy and
catharsis coming from the realization of this fact. I often refer to
my work being something that is not created but what remains. More
than expression, my work is about searching. I'm looking for what
lies underneath when all the layers and properties are stripped off,
in the nameless heart. Rather than indulging in the cold facts of
life that is characteristic to expressionism, I want to look for a
fine balance between the two extremes without being lukewarm.
My work lies somewhere
between human and nature, abstraction and form, light and darkness.
The ascetic world that I'm after has maybe started from a vision or
something visible but often it ends up being a world that evokes
other type of sensations through eyes. When I look at paintings by
others I'm most interested in the friction between the clumsy matter
and the nimble vision, the intention and the outcome, the taming of
matter. I don't use reference images as I'm working, so everything is
dependent on memory. And often the image is put together from pieces
of different impressions and memories that I find myself being
obsessed about. For me all the sensory impressions are the origin for
the image, not just the ones received through eyes. Painting is a
rigorous study of reality through uncertain senses.
Reima Nevalainen
February 10th 2020
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| photo: Angel Gil |
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| photo: Angel Gil |
