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."