NULLA SUCCEDE PER CASO

"When writing my first novel Vanikan palat [Pieces of Crispbread] I knew that I wanted to paint themes arising from it," says Hannu Väisänen. "After finishing the book I began to paint, and it was like the same process. But it was different with Toiset kengät [The Other Shoes]. I definitely felt that the things of which I wrote were not developing into visual themes, at least not yet. When Toiset kengät came out last November I experienced, in a way for the first time, what it feels like to shift from writing to making images.

Spring was well under way in the South of France and painting felt both good and important. For the first time, or for the first time that I remember, I didn't have any actual theme either, nothing that I should have told. I mostly wanted to see what the oils could do. I had a tremendous desire to spread yellow or red paint on canvas.

Now with only a month to go before the opening of the exhibition, I have completed a number of works on paper and over twenty canvases which don't even have titles. I enjoy it and I really feel that I've discovered something new."

Of course he made sketches all the time, also while writing. In his customary manner, Väisänen marked them with dates according to the month and year, July 06, January 07 etc. When the possibilities of a few colours, especially stilj de grain yellow, began to interest the artist more and more as the painting progressed, titles began to emerge from combinations of the date of the sketch and the predominant colour of each work.

This blithe void began to be stealthily filled by the Roman author Lucretius whose cosmological poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) Väisänen had again begun to read, in prose translation, especially the passage in which Lucretius presents his ideas on atoms.

Consequently, a new element can be seen in Väisänen's idiom of visual expression, a motif resembling a cobblestone, pearl or scale, with patterns derived from it appearing in many of his works.

"It really started to emerge as randomly as possible. I sat down at a table and began to draw a small design, atoms, in pencil. Along with Lucretius I was haunted by a saying that, for some reason or other, I'd heard on several occasions on my last trip to Italy and which could really be the title of this whole showing: Nulla succede per caso, nothing happens by chance. I thought that if I would carry on with this, sooner or later I would have a design that looks like something, means something or just begins to interest me enough."

Hannu shows me a sketch that evolved into Yellow in December

"It's impossible to say what that design represents. You could see it as a cross, a piece of wood or just a shred torn from somewhere. If you turn it sideways or upside-down, you would see something else in it. In the finished painting the important thing for me is that delicious and intense hue of yellow. Its glow comes as if from behind, forcing elements of the painting and everything taking place between them to the surface of the image, to absolute two-dimensionality, and that's what I was aiming at."

The atoms of March Yellow seem to form a bunch of grapes, and in the central part of February Blue Väisänen has made an oval scale shape with a massive feel to it that readily brings to mind a shield or even a square seen from above.

"In the studies in grey (Grey in June, August, September... ) or for instance in April Violet you can, of course, see leaves, buds, pods, branches and things like that, but I arrived at these, too, without any conscious aim."

Väisänen's interest in two-dimensionality has led him towards planes of colour that have become increasingly thinner and even. He has not, however, been completely uncompromising in this aim, as shown, for example by Grey in November. Here, the grey foliage pattern that takes into its lyrical embrace the theme of the central area resembling the surface of a bluish-black natural stone is painted so succulently that it creates an almost tangibly material, and thus three-dimensional, texture of the brushwork.

"There are other slips in those greys, too," says the artist. "In June Grey the dance of the particles creates the feeling of movement, which in turn almost always creates an impression of depth." There is also movement in July Grey in which the twisting black streaks clearly overlay the spinning grey designs of the propeller's arc.

I saw two finished works in red. Hannu would have liked to call one of them Beautiful Red, but he understood that this would have been impolite towards all the other works. Viewers of the exhibition can therefore choose their own Beautiful Red. In January Red, the eye comes across what seems to be sensuality masked with a light powdering, and the tone of October Red is intensely bright while fleeting into some kind of immateriality.

And what should we say of Yellow in April with its play of elements? Does the maple leaf of Canada that has fallen into the middle of the oval or kidney-shaped palette and has frayed and deformed sprout from Voltaire's ear, or vice-versa? Either way, at least it takes place precisely on the surface of the image.

These paintings thus radiate their light rather than glimmer with it; the novelty of their forms captures the gaze and challenges the viewer to interpret. Nonetheless, they have a connection with Väisänen's earlier works, perhaps most clearly in the recognizability of lines forming garlands and the liberated blissful harmony created by the forms resting on the surface of the image.

Martti Anhava