Marianna Uutinen's works to date could be described as painting of a relief-like spatial character with which she has reformed the idiom and material opportunities of painting over the past fifteen years. Looking at her latest works, one is reminded of how her acrylic paintings of the 1990s required conventional viewers to become accustomed to them. Once again, she challenges the viewer with something unexpected, as if always moving one step ahead in her expression. In her new paintings, Uutinen only alludes to her former full-blown materiality. The works are barer and more reduced than before, yet with grandiosity in their ultimate expression: garish grounds, simplified shapes, the direct strokes of the roller and sharp contrasts of colour in open composition.
Uutinen's newest works are a step towards a void, but not a leap into the unknown. A familiarity lingers in the content, arising from everyday life - a thematic world familiar from the artist's earlier works. She is now addressing with greater focus the superficiality of emotions and the blunt sexual tone of the present-day world. Her idiom tells of treating contemporary themes of identity and the banalities encountered by contemporary people in their everyday lives. The colours of the new series of works are reduced to sparseness and hardness - even to the point of being aggressive. The surface has also become flattened to the extreme, to resemble the content that it depicts. It is, however, impossible to say precisely how the contents of the paintings should be read. In fact, ambivalence of meaning has always been a definitive trait of Uutinen's art. Having its connections with banality, Uutinen's painting appears this time as an openness and transparency of forms that could be connected, for example, with the outspoken media and publicity forcing itself into our lives. Things, phenomena and people are made up to be anonymous, resembling each other, and the sexualized narratives that are told follow the same patterns. In corresponding terms, the intimate becoming the public is of increasing commonality in the present-day world, and knowledge of other people's doings has become, as it were, a necessary part of one's own process of identity. Such interpretations, however, arise from the viewers themselves. Uutinen cannot be regarded, now any more than previously, as an actual media critic or an artist making political statements. The ambivalence of her art, arising from subtly constructed irony and an allusive camp spirit precludes the validity of any strict definitions. Criticism and its absence, guise and straightforwardness, identification and distinction can all be found, simultaneously, in her paintings.
Uutinen's art has always been physical, highly corporeal. Despite the flatness of the new paintings, the new space that can be sensed in them is the concrete background of an event including the viewer. The feel of the material remains, while the surface is emphasized as an apparently simple image. The background separates and eroticizes the mark of the paint roller. The marks are laden with hints - things unworked that do not express their message outright but can nonetheless be allusively recognized by the viewer. Emotion, however, has been reduced to non-existence from the marks: the heart does not depict the emotion of love, but rather the awareness of its absence through its rigid form. Once again, despite their disturbing approach, Uutinen's paintings are not about frank criticism but rather liberation from superficiality and the lack of emotion through awareness.
The paint roller, a common tool, appears on the canvas as an anonymous mark, yet also as sabotage of artistry. In their formality, artificiality and minimalism, Uutinen's culminations of expression are like Duchamp's pissoir, a shock for art, a series of obscene of and banal acts also focusing on the artist herself and her earlier works with their spirit of originality. Uutinen's latest paintings underscore the whole act: the mark of the paint roller plays a specific role on the canvas as a sign of direct action, even damage or the presence of randomness. The marks underline the canvas as a space, the context of something depicted. In the new paintings, the contrast of the background is an important factor: the mark looks like an object in a space, like the creased acrylic of the earlier works, though now with a different mechanism of spatiality.
An abstract background as space cannot be imagined beyond the subject, i.e. lacking any real active 'self' or interpreting 'you'. The works also call for the viewer's ability to identify and establish distance, to be physically and mentally present. Space and event cannot be depicted similarly for everyone. In their "spaces", Uutinen's banal acts are not absolute but the product of subjective, even personal, ideas of life and the contemporary world. Therefore, they also arouse the viewer to the necessary self-awareness. How inevitably do we let ourselves be influenced? And how unconsciously or consciously do we absorb these influences?
Pilvi Kalhama
Translation: Jüri Kokkonen
An Apparent Lightness
Marianna Uutinen has made acrylic works of collage type for over ten years, using them to create a markedly unique idiom. But despite visual and material abundance, Uutinen has always approached her themes and subjects with moderation - thematically her works do not underline things nor do they give the viewer ready-made interpretations. Uutinen says that in the early stages of her career she explicitly tried to find a material that would in a way depict itself and be self-reflective. Through an emphasis on the construction of the work and its materiality, Uutinen’s art approaches what underlies it in our present age. Each brushstroke or mark always means something - there is no such thing as a pure sign. Marianna Uutinen’s works also operate on this principle, as a social sign of surrounding reality.
Although in most cases Uutinen’s plastic works do not directly represent anything, they find immediate associations in their world of colour and contrasts alone with our contemporary culture of experiences. At first sight, these works bring to mind the glamour of show business, the coloured light effects of the urban milieu or the fashion industry – all things that we find not only annoying but also appealing, interesting and even desirable. But despite their markedly material nature, these works do not underscore visible reality but rather appear to accept contemporary culture as such. The acrylic works dealing with the superficial world generate associations of ostentation, a modern-day masquerade performed individually or en masse, but always with some kind of message. Without taking a stand for or against anything, Uutinen’s works challenge the viewer to think of the reasons for this masquerade, and of the mechanisms of attendant reality that goad us to it. Uutinen’s acrylic works make reference to the excesses of our culture, often slipping beyond the boundary of innocence and harmlessness - charm and naïve desire change into grotesque pleasure. Exaggeration prevents the traditional aesthetic experience of beauty, and closer inspection generates a restless feeling, the lack of authenticity making one feel uncertain. The viewer’s emotion is produced by the conflict between one’s own genuine existence and the depiction of artificial reality.
Touching upon the world of desire, Uutinen’s themes link her whole oeuvre to the questions of the subject that grew in prominence towards the end of the last millennium. Where modernist visual art is based on individualism, the idea that it is possible to achieve a whole individual defining, experiencing and having a central role in outside chaos, Uutinen prevents the subject from being seen as a heroic individual. The thematic of her works operates along the whole scale of the public-private axis. They do not directly depict any subject but rather address the viewer-subject, challenging the viewer to take a position on his or her own physical nature, and raising questions about artificial needs and desires. In particular, the effect of Uutinen’s large works, overflowing with materiality and luring the senses, prevent the viewer from remaining a passive onlooker. From the perspective of modernist purist aesthetics these works are big "misunderstandings" operating as they do on the basis of many channels and senses. The mechanism of Uutinen’s works could be compared to classicist architecture and art in which one is aware of harmonious proportions relative to one’s own body; they also invite the viewer to feel the works as corporeal objects. It is only the result of sensing that is different. Instead of a harmonious and composed mood, the works seek to arouse and even incite the senses to a point where agitation lies at one extreme. The result of all this is that the works do not close in on themselves but open up to the process of reception. As the senses are stimulated, interest shifts from the object as such to desire and sensing themselves. They arouse associations of feelings that we encounter only in an illusory way – even often in real life.
Pilvi Kalhama
(based on an article published in Form Function Finland 2/2002 )
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"Marianna Uutinen’s art has often been characterized in terms of a feminine or feministic reaction towards the tradionally masculine language of painting. To certain extent, this is true and valid, but there are other aspects to this work worth discussing. There is a level in Uutinen’s art that reveals the discomforts of the union between tradition-consciousness and the quest for freedom combined with the ability to tell one’s own story. This is the road where traditions are translated into personal idioms and concepts and rules into one’s own experience.
It is difficult for her not to pay attention to traditions while actually searching for a way to be free from them and from the constrains imbued in the awareness of painting traditions. The only way for her to continue seems to be the long road that goes through the traditions and leads to the hard-conquered possibilites of expressing painterly freedom at the time when only vertical advancement seems possible in this field of appropriations. Uutinen’s search is however in both directions: The verticality is represented in her obvious play with and consciousness of the traditions while the horizontality is manifested in the metonymic juxtapositions of elements derived from various visual practices. Usage of chance imagery like this leads to the kind of surrealistic readings that we often unwillingy find ourselves engaged in while walking in city streets.
The camouflage operation that seems to have best served her aims up until now has been the kind of abandon she often seems to have exactly towards the tradition of painting. Superficially seen, she shows no respect to the Art of painting breaking free of its basic tenets whenever she discerns the slighest opportunity or opening for such a manoeuvre. She has sculpted three-dimensional object paintings by using acrylic medium to harden colour pigments into volumes. She has used unortodox colour pigments, oscillated between the definitions of the seducative and repulsive, the naive and the sophisticated."
"Beauty is often experienced as a trap by contemporary artists. Despite the intrest in beauty shown in compotemporary American paintings, European art seems to be suspicious of its value and sceptical of its definitions. And what kind of beauty: the kind that is supported by institutions which is so fragile that it can only live under these protected circumstances or the kind of beauty that has "street credibility". It seems that it is somewhere between these consepts, or ideas, or experiences of beauty that Marianna Uutinen’s search is presently taking place. It is serious search that does not shun experimenting with the most banal, the most obvious and the already used to find out whether there is still space for freedom and personal expression."
Maaretta Jaukkuri: Missing painting, 1998 (excerpts)
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