Panta Rhei

In cities like this, strangers do not look at each other. A direct gaze is easily read as an invasion of privacy, or even a sign of aggression. Accordingly, local residents follow their daily routes with their eyes focused on some indefinite point in infinity; the world appears to them as a mosaic of changing planes and patterns, articulated with sharply focused looks. Instead of individual faces they will meet a semi-morphous flow of heads and coats, from which the gaze picks only that which it needs to survive. Everything else is erased, except for a few random details – an earring, the colour of clothes, the pointed tip of a shoe.

Sunna’s paintings, often small and always intensive, bring to mind the recollections that are recorded in flashes on the retina in the everyday life of a metropolis. Though at first sight they appear to have turned their backs on the centuries of tradition of painting, they are in fact bound to it in many ways. Besides, there can be no painting outside the tradition. The moment that the first brushstroke violates the purity of the white canvas, the work-to-be joins its countless predecessors.

The Impressionists, the first to paint the metropolis, altered the conception of time in painting. They stepped out of their studios to pursue fleeting moments. They also emphasized the importance of the moment with compositional croppings whose examples they found in photography. In the 1950s. Willem de Kooning, the painter of New York, underlined that the content of his art was only a glance, a fleeting look.

But these works were often samples, taken out of the stream of events, compositional and finished even in their expressiveness. But Sunna’s paintings are explicitly "unfocused" or "imperfect", bringing to mind a camera shaken at the moment of exposure, a stopped video image, or the mirrors of amusement parks. The power of the works largely resides in their seeming to be without any final form. They appear to take shape before the eyes of the viewer, in the present moment.

While carrying on her dialogue with tradition, Sunna marks a distance from it by seeking her way beyond established concepts and to their nodes and intersections. She lets her paintings be formed of interspersed light, dark and translucent thinly applied patches. She places the abstract against the figurative. And her works entail a strong performative dimension, the presence of the artist. The brush, sometimes moving very freely and even brutally, leaves the paintings full of small, yet significant, random features. A black dot can be a hole, a button, an eye – or a black dot.

Looking at Sunna’s paintings, the gaze moves continuously between the parts and the whole. The individual planes of colour take changing roles as parts of the image and as independent elements in the pictorial space. Contours move fluidly, in a way that brings to mind both the Impressionists and the rich rhythms of the Japanese woodblock prints that Sunna admires. The entwined and interspersed colours form a multidimensional space in movement, an organic and flowing cubism.

But the figurativeness of the paintings is to such a degree allusive that the viewer has to complement and interpret what is seen, adding to it his own knowledge, views and experiences. Sunna’s paintings are a reminder of the fact that a painting always involves a dialogue. It is not only a two-dimensional object on a wall, but also a mirror of high definition. It is a space where the object of the gaze and the projections of the viewer onto it enter into a discussion. What a painting shows us greatly depends on us, the viewers, on what we know, desire, or dare to see in it.

Unlike many Impressionists and particularly many artists of the present day, Sunna does not use photographs as starting points or as an aid to her memory. Her works are born in the situation where they are painted. They grow from a dialogue between the proposals of the painting itself and the stream of images of the streets. The first fleck is joined by a second one, and a third one covers part of the first one, and so on. Mari Sunna relies on the independent growth of her paintings as much as she relies on her hand steering that growth. In her work, she seeks to maintain a direct and truthful relationship with her everyday sphere of life. A painting is finished when it has achieved a sufficient likeness.