A mind that looks for familiar shapes or figures, symbols, explanations or other such ‘grips of the world’ can feel helpless when confronted by Jorma Hautala’s paintings: these are pictorial spaces that refrain from turning into verbal spaces. To the lyricist’s metaphor apparatus they seem to say: find if you can, but our presence needs nothing more than the verb to be. Still, they could be considered as challenges, for these pictures by no means turn their backs on you. They open out powerfully and intimately towards the viewer.
Hautala has from the very beginning represented for me absolute painting in the same sense as absolute music. Relying on ones vision one enters a ‘landscape’ that has to be witnessed and can be analysed only through itself. What the viewer experiences is a transition into a space that by looking transforms from a two-dimensional to a more and more three-dimensional space. In Hautala’s pictures there always seems to be as much space as the eye and the consciousness are prepared to take in.
The significance of colour seems more essential than ever: that is where the light of these paintings is. Often they shift by degrees from brighter to more shadowy surfaces (as in the Kamakura series) and still retain their translucency, unless they become black. Hautala’s pictures nevertheless feel always solid, reliable in a way that never leaves one out on a limb or lost. Even when light and airy they have weight which comes from overcoming matter, they allow the viewer to breathe. The colour surfaces are restful like nature; the tension of the lines brings the artist’s intellect into play.
There are now perhaps fewer sharp lines representing ‘action’ than before. In some of the works symmetrical dotted lines add an extra dimension of both firmness and porousness. The surface dividing into two halves of equal size but different colour and line-structure brings a quiet drama to some of the pictures. When looking at one of them, Jorma Hautala ruminated that a human face is also divided vertically into two halves and that these halves are not identical. It came to my mind how fundamentally man was the ultimate yardstick of these paintings: a perceptive and responsive wanderer in an urban, industrialised, landscape surrounded by the sea. In the landscape that forms his daily route. Its beauty knows no great gestures. It simply steps forward into view.
Pentti Saaritsa
Translation: Harald Arnkil
