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 )
