Eggtempera on Canvas
Eggtempera on Canvas
Eggtempera on Canvas
C V
|
|
I have never particularly liked naiveté in art. Nor humour. My taste is a product of history reproduced through education. Ever since I was a small boy I've learned to like two kinds of art. It has either been extremely aesthetic – sensitive and beautiful – or imbued with heavy experience, strong expressiveness. But things beautiful and heavy also turn into clichés very soon. And one becomes used to everything. Then along came a new kind of political art, critically analysing gender roles, identity, everyday life and the institutions of art. But for how long can a middle-aged man find something exciting in young women artists studying their identity from one year to another, in almost identical ways? Even new art adopts mannerisms very quickly. And one does become used to everything-
The result is international clean. At its worst, art is quite boring.
A new start. I have never particularly liked naiveté in art. Nor humour. But then along came Anu Tuominen. Her imagery, continually analysing the cases of our language and branching off in all possible directions as voyages and expeditions of discovery, invites the viewer to take part. After many years and many frustrations I finally found an artist whose works I could genuinely – and in a somewhat old-fashioned way – claim to love. I even rediscovered my lost puerile envy: Why didn’t I do that? That’s how it should be! Dammit, why didn’t I think of that?
Anu Tuominen is definitely the most genuine Lévi-Straussian bricoleur that I have ever come across in contemporary art. Her myriad flea-market finds are accumulated, combined, transformed, lined up, concatenated and classified into all areas of our everyday visual world. In addition to the image, she also addresses language, visual idiom and metaphor. Where is the cat in the catkin? Tuominen’s works present an endless array of parallels, analogies, continuums and hierarchies. She transposes the image into words and the word into images, the public into things private, and the private into the public.
When Anu Tuominen begins work on a piece, she is genuinely naïve, looking at the world in childlike amazement. She innocently asks all imaginable questions, and their corollaries, boldly posing even stupid ones. But looking at the finished works the viewer does not see a naivist but an innovative and mature grammatologist. Anu Tuominen is also a humorist, but she does not tell jokes. A told joke is deflated, as often happens to initially incomprehensible art once it is understood. Tuominen’s works are not deflated. Inexorably, time and again, she demonstrates how things small are beautiful and large – but above all joyous and fun. Her works present us with a world, our own world, the past world of our grandparents, and the future world of our children, viewed slightly beneath the surface. Tuominen is an archaeologist of knowledge, and a gardener of the image, scraping into view the small roots that often make two plants one. And although post-modernism has taught us that everything has already been done, something completely new is sometimes still created. Anu Tuominen has done that. She developed the poetics of the grammatology of the everyday.
Otso Kantokorpi
|
|
)
)
)