Pastel works, watercolours, drawings

28.8. – 21.9. 2003

"Light and shade, joy and suffering – they always run adjacent.
And people are like tightrope-walkers on their boundary."

Rafael Wardi has always had his own way of seeing. Through his brushwork, Helsinki’s Lauttasaari suburb, Market Square and countless other familiar, everyday locations have gained a new, more positive and grander content in the minds of viewers.

We have gradually come to know the person behind the works, "piling days on top of each other... the best ones of top", taking life as it comes, finding joy and light even in the gloomiest situations, and passing them onto us in wonderful enduring images.

It is characteristic of Wardi that wherever he goes – among those near to him who are weak and suffering or to the palaces of knowledge and power – he will encounter another human being, his equal, a brother or sister.

Wardi writes in the catalogue of the present exhibition:

"At the president’s Kultaranta residence there was this man, one of the security people, who had a sailing boat, and I asked him what exactly is so great of being afloat. And he said that when you put your hand in the water you know that in many other places all around the world people are putting their hands in the water, which is the same water, and that creates a bond. To have your fingers in the same water, that I suppose is the feeling that many people seek here."

Exactly. And it is precisely this feeling of community, of the joy of sharing and the permanence of goodness in the transient moment that Wardi’s works arouse in us.

*****

Rafael Wardi builds bridges, combines things and seeks entities, whether they concern the internal properties of works – light, colour and composition – or form and content, beauty and ugliness, memory and knowledge, art and life, and ultimately the artist and the viewer. There is a great deal of talk about the everyday, non-places, interstices and transitions in contemporary art. Rafael Wardi also talks about these things. In his works the traditionally 'sublime' of aesthetics encounters from a new perspective the 'everyday' that is so important to contemporary art. "When it has to do with life it is not dreadfulness but beauty." Wardi's art leads us into everyday domains that are rarely talked; hidden ageing and death have been made unnatural in our culture. And yet they remain part of the whole, a part of our consciousness that continues to influence us. Wardi quotes the Finnish poet Lasse Heikkilä: "What is lacking is sought out by the artist."

Rafael Wardi's works are neither still images nor documents. They live and breathe on many levels. The first movement is in depth with light and colour making the works breathe. The second movement takes place in time, both linear and cyclical. Present here are history and the tradition of painting, as well as the cycle of life. Some of the people depicted in the paintings have died by the time they are viewed. I am shaken to write this, but I know I must do it. The third movement links us to the world as individuals with an expansion of the horizon of understanding produced by a movement between things general and specific. I too will die and age! These are my fellow human beings! "Don't quarrel with your mother unnecessarily," says Wardi to me when our conversation strays from the art world. Or are life and art still united?

Wardi's fast pastel technique combines perception with memory. He begins with an observation – a lump on a hand, a groove in the skin or the light and shadow of a night lamp on the face of his wife Reetta, but he does not strive for realistic documentation. "I work very fast. The important thing is to remember. I don't want to use photographs; I do what I remember. When I remember something it has gone into me, into my hand. I sharpen my recollection all the time by drawing and painting." Paradoxically, when memory sharpens and clarifies it also changes from the specific to the general. Through my personal history, a moment in the nursing home can change into an aspect of Jewishness, or of the whole history of painting. Traumas and unorganized areas become part of some larger entity. And it is the entity, the whole, that interests Wardi: "The whole has disintegrated… the artist can bring forth that whole…" It is this pendulum movement of hermeneutic understanding between the general and the specific that makes Wardi's art endure, even though the works involve the recording of memory, they are not just still images of the present life of this particular artist, of this particular observation. "When you paint, you enter an area that cannot be understood in written terms," says Wardi. "You have to understand these things with instinct and the senses," he notes while looking at his own works. And he doesn't always recognize himself either: "I wonder what I was trying to say in that one? The figures seem to be stepping forth from the past."