Painted Bareness

Sometimes you can see more in the dark.
Or things in addition.
At least more slowly.
This happened long ago.
And once.

I arrived late, later than the clock showed.
My map was so new and beautiful that it had nothing to say to my mind.
Carefully folded rustling patterns.
Like travelling in the company of a skirt hem.

I spent the night in a house with three times the number of storeys, corridors, staircases and rooms than you would have thought in the beam of the car’s headlights.

-Welcome. No problem. It’s been a long time… Here’s your room. Good. Night. See you in the morning.

I woke in the early hours. Thirsty. I went to look for a tap. Or a toilet. The moon was full, wedging its light into the rooms. Moonlight looking like paper on the floors. I tried not to step on the sheets.

Breathing behind closed doors. Refrigerator humming somewhere. The snap of parquetry.

I had come to the door of a living-room that filled the whole floor. So close to the edge of the house that I felt dizzy. Or was it just a corridor enclosing the house like an angular ring, an orbit for the sleepless and lost?

It happened there and then.
From which these words come.

Next to me I saw a surface woven of cobwebs or silk. (Or was that part of the wall frozen?) Dimly shining figures. Thousands of fibrous marks, mycelia… flickering and throbbing.

Grey in black, darkness in shade, layered and overlapping. Latent image with heartbeat. Continuum bound to time and place. Not a sight but a feeling. The feeling of being.

It was all different in the morning.
It was just a painting by Marika Makelä on the wall.
All that the darkness had left behind.
Or its spoor.
Painted bareness.
Being. Matter.
Particles of pigment in espresso vapour.

Twelve steps before Marika (N.B. This is taking place now, just a moment ago), I see through the window of the staircase a hammock made of blue rope on a snow-padded balcony. And diagonally upwards, high up on the left, an observatory built on the roof. Would I even have noticed them if I hadn’t been so close to Marika (I can already smell the cigarette smoke)? If I hadn’t been on my way to see.

Twenty-five paintings, of course I first thought there were thirty, dignified, in the same space, on all the walls, with no beginning or end.

And then it all comes immediately to mind, tightening my forehead and temples and drying my mouth, and the conversation with Marika doesn’t really lead anywhere.

It’s doesn’t matter. It’s really better like this,

(There they are leaning against the walls. Or falling onto each other on the floor. And smelling good. Everything is good. Everything has arrived.)

- No self-portraits, just pictures of the self freed from portrayal.
- No self, just its depths.
- Conversions into paintings while painted.
- Transition there, not back.
- Finite standstills.
- Layered excavation marked slowly and carefully.
- Noting something.
- Floor plans from the deep.
- Liberation from the illusion of explanation or owning.
- Leaving things as such and as they are.
- Pure existence on its own.
- Signings.

And again I would like to take Marika’s paintings/panels of material and pile upside down on the floors. Or hang them reversed on the walls. I’ve always had the gut feeling that her works are related to fortune-telling cards – laid in "tables" and fields through set formulas and rituals.

These are close views of interiors. Be the subject anything at all, material or immaterial. Bacterium or cell, flesh or mineral alike: a seeking and exploring mind will perceive and pass on its discoveries in the guise of formulas looking like designs.

It is about specification. What the thought has in mind. This is the sensual pleasure of demonstrating that which is experienced. The logic of womb or seed.

Lovers, wet, hot and slick, panting into one another’s ears: QED! QED! QED! (Quod erat demonstrandum! Which was to be demonstrated!)

Kaj Kalin

Modernist, intellectual, lucid, hard – "masculine". Eternal, feeling, sensuous, soft – "feminine". We have learned to divide, classify and separate things. Intellect and sensuality have been thought to reject or at least avoid one another. And how could something soft be clear and lucid?

All these properties form a synthesis in Marika Mäkelä’s recent paintings. A clear modernist form avoiding narrative, a severe grammar of planes and space, becomes a language where it takes on the intensity of colour of the wing of a brimstone butterfly and the petals or stamens of red or black tulips. Cocoa, chocolate, wine or vanilla. Where surfaces are of powder, bare skin, silk or the metal of swords. Where a painting is at once space, respiration and a mirror.

What is painting? Does it have a sense of its own, or should rather a poem, sculpture, operetta, photograph or video be written or made to express something? No. Marika Mäkelä’s paintings speak of that which can only be said with the brush of a great painter. Her themes and subjects refer to things of major import, and her manner of painting brings them close, to be comprehended, wandered through with the gaze, and enjoyed.

Ilona Anhava

The inner and outer wall of a vessel

Painting is like a vessel. When the saturation point is reached, when the vessel is filled, we speak of the death of painting, as we have done for a long time. But the inner wall of a vessel is not the perimeter of the world. Time and again there appears a work that brings to mind ideas of the power, or comeback of painting. And with the passing of the decades and repeated returns, we can speak of an eternal comeback.

It is within this tension that Marika Mäkelä’s works are created. They are a synthesis of the death and power of painting. When she has taken gold, silver and her velvety blue to the extremes of ornamentality, the time is ripe for purification. Mäkelä has recently discussed what work as a professional artists produces. She wants to take up painting again, to feel its joy and freedom – though well aware of the illusory character of that freedom. She has purged her visual idiom, interpreting things differently than before, returning to basic concerns. With fewer elements of the surface, the elements of value and texture, for example, will be emphasized and they will also become more demanding. Many of Mäkelä’s works even reveal constructivist tones. She has also painted a white surface, "working it so carefully that it exists". In a sense she is now at the same point as in the 1970s when she began her career, noticing that "the same things are important". But she now has the benefit of 30 years of experience, the memory of the hand.

Once again, less is more. With a small surface of association, Mäkelä’s narrative elements do not generate tales or lead the viewer to other realities, even though she has sometimes been interpreted as doing so. "I don’t employ any startling, unknown elements in my paintings. My symbols are in common use and they are recognizable." Marika Mäkelä’s world is not mysterious, exotic or escapist: "Allusions to other cultures do not spring from any nostalgia produced by memories, a desire to be somewhere – somewhere else. They are traces of memory." The references are identifiable, but they cannot be given a time or place; they do not illustrate a certain history; they are not cave paintings discovered by archaeologists and given radiocarbon dates: "This is not about an archaeological excavation, but of how that excavation is marked and plotted."

There is always a human presence in Mäkelä’s paintings, even unseen – but never as a person that could be identified or recognized. The interpretation proceeds from the general to the specific, and from the specific to the general. In her works, that which is dead is alive in the form of the painting – as colour, form, material, line and value. It is here and now. "The allusion takes leave of its starting points once it is within the painting." The artist chooses, shapes, accepts and at times even shows what things are not. Of course the artist herself is always present in Mäkelä’s works, but this is not a question of therapy or unbridled expressiveness. Her own associations are denuded. Her works are not programmatically biographic even though one could try to approach them as such at a later stage. They are paintings. "There are no other stories behind them." The intensity of Mäkelä’s paintings is created via their transcendental nature. They are full of people and life but in unidentifiable form. "I go through people in my mind when I work. No Schopenhauers, just people I known, their relationships. life and history. I’m alone in my studio, but I’m not lonely."

Marika Mäkelä’s paintings are like a vessel, whose interface of the inner and outer surface consists in the specific and the general, history and the present, things familiar and alien, painting and life. I am continually reminded of a reversible pattern in Islamic ornament. Looking at the form I look at it like a man would and ask her: "What does that crest mean?" She replies: "It’s a vessel."

Otso Kantokorpi

Why do Marika Mäkelä’s paintings demand to be seen and remembered? They seem to continue beyond their borders, and they appeal to other senses than sight alone. They address the main thing, with no subordinate clauses. They contain some kind of suggestion of being in the centre, and they are full of the profound authority of femininity.

The daughter of an army major, Marika Mäkelä grew up on military bases, ogled by thousands of conscript eyes. Disturbing mental images of her undressing and going to bed have illustrated countless restless dreams and masturbatory fantasies. For her, men are definitely not competitors. She has a self-evident assurance of her own unique nature.

Marika Mäkelä paints large canvases, often triptychs, with no sky or horizon, or even perspective. Their subject and theme cannot be given a location. They are mostly views of nature, a season, or time of day. Nothing recognizably concrete, but a material maze of reflections and allusive forms that appears to begin in the middle and in which the viewer feels placed. The feeling of closeness is spread throughout the canvas and seems to continue unseen beyond it. It comes from deliberately visible brush strokes giving a presence to the unseen artist. The viewer is faced by an immense unquestioning wave of femininity and an intimacy that seems to be made by clawing and scratching. The viewer cannot control the unforced, mad faith and deep confessional closeness of this woman. The devil only knows what is the joy of an omnipotent female in the painting and what is feminine depression for no reason. Although the theme can be a mood or feeling of nature, the viewer will only see the artist or woman at a certain stage of her life, at a certain age, amidst the overall events of life as a whole.

Marika Mäkelä often works with paint in thick layers, and the influence of things covered under the surface is present, producing time, age and continuity. Men seek to arrest time into the eternal and undying. The cohesive force, core, of the works of a woman, of Marika Mäkelä, is a deep awareness of the continuity of all things within the picture and beyond it. The paintings show that they have been painted for a long time, the viewer is not offended by their price.

In speaking of strong women today, we forget that in the past a pregnant woman was considered strong. But Marika Mäkelä is rather a profound, determined artist faithful to her innermost self. But in some sense her works are marked by a former state of strength, pregnancy. By this I mean the feeling that she deals with the main and most important things. This must be due primarily to the concentration of means and colours. Mäkelä’s colours do not come from Little Red Riding Hood’s basket. Rather, they belong to a pile of stones in the gloom of the wolf’s belly. But regardless of her choice of colour, the harmony of hues lends an assured feeling that we must follow this person, who sees and knows things in a deeper way. Her colours are credible rather than colourful. They acquire life from each other, multiplying each other’s effect. They target all our senses in a strange way. We hear her blue and we feel the green as moist; the brown feels old on our skins, while we begin to be agitated by all the other senses, including smell, taste, balance, pressure, perception and direction.

And from where did she come up with the gold? In the mid-1980s, Marika Mäkelä began to include, with no explanation, gold ingots in her paintings, gleaming among their generally life-worn colours. Gold, unmistakable down to its colour and texture, like a surrogate sun in the middle of the picture.

With her colours, Marika Mäkelä is in some way serious, occupied, pregnant. The titles that she has given to her works are maternally apt and an integral part of them. The brushwork composes and binds everything; colour orchestrates and the title is added like a song: Cloak of Gold and Rust, Beneath the Sky of White-Grey Water, or Like a Watchman of the Night. This is how the idea of some kind of Wagnerian total work of art is achieved.

Most women artists distribute discrimination; Marika Mäkelä shares her riches. The father of the others was an individual; Marika Mäkelä’s father was a man. She is completely secure and assured, wielding feminine power over us, her viewers. The message of most women artists is one of offended sensitivity. They seek to be alone with their viewers. They accuse the world. Marika Mäkelä’s paintings take it as self-evident that there are many viewers, and that everyone wants to see. It would never occur to her to accuse anyone for the world being the world, and for life being life.

Jouko Turkka

Jouko Turkka is a well-known and esteemed Finnish theatre director and author.