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
)
)
)
)
)
)
)