Mougins
Juhana Blomstedt spent the winter of 2004 –2005 at Mougins in the South of France. During this period he made small pieces of sculpture from scrap wood – pruned branches from the garden and parts of fruit crates – leaving them either with their natural colour or toning them with light-coloured paints.
Through their forms the sculptures resemble totems associated with the animal or plant kingdom, the talismans of indigenous peoples, or ancient schematic representations of snakes or bolts of lightning. They have the appearance of being at the same time primal, the products of man's eternal quest, and completely modern. One does not really know what they are, but they have a strange and alluring small-scale sanctity to them.
The viewer can have total command of a small piece of sculpture, while the work, in turn, takes the viewer in its grasp by virtue of the monumentality and enigmatic nature of its content and form.
Later in Finland, Blomstedt continued his Mougins series with monumental drawings in charcoal on paper on the themes of form of the sculpted pieces. We know that Juhana Blomstedt's charcoal drawings – when we have the rare opportunity to see them –belong to the nobility of drawn art. They reveal the hand of a simultaneously intuitive and explicit artist, unadorned and pure. They are incontestable, final.
Anthologie
The present exhibition also contains a painting, Anthologie, in which Juhana Blomstedt has compiled some of the main themes of his earlier paintings. It is typical of Blomstedt to develop his themes, with one leading to another and sprouting those that follow after which he may return to an earlier one, reinforcing, reinterpreting and specifying it. And gradually these individual themes, "words", form a language whose expressive power and precision grow stronger by being developed and used, and through repetition and variation, leaving less and less room for incorrect interpretations, becoming itself.
And all of it is encompassed by beauty.
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