Pastel paintings
"Life is like going berry-picking. One picks thus and thus."
Rafael Wardi has a different way of seeing, more brilliant than that of others. Through his gaze and brush, countless familiar, everyday places and phenomena have been given completely new, almost unrecognizable expression. Places like Helsinki’s Lauttasaari, Market Square and Katajanokka.
In the present exhibition, Wardi’s new, wonderful pastel works take as their themes the Swedish Embassy building and Market Square in Helsinki, the presidential summer residence at Kultaranta, and others. In Wardi’s hands, both culture and nature turn into a brilliant sea of light and colour for the viewer to enjoy.
WSOY publishers recently issued a magnificent book on Rafael Wardi’s art and thoughts. "The best book ever made about me," says the artist himself. Richly illustrated and finely designed, the book contains an essay by Taru Elfving on Wardi’s art and an article by Martti Anhava based on interviews with Rafael Wardi, in which the artist notes:
"Art and the erotic have something to do with each other, they come from the same source."
"I paint a great deal from memory. Memory is frozen reality, or dreams."
"The best art leaves things open, but it is difficult. The work must be professional, but it must look like it was done just like that."
"Morandi said that the visible may contain ever so much of the unseen. One does not have to afraid of it. For him, bottles were metaphysical."
"Mental illness can also mean that a person has wisdom and fine thoughts deep within that he or she cannot grasp."
"The important, essential things are often in between, in between things that appear to be big. Someone has once said that God resides in between, or aside from things."
"I feel that I am a product of this century and this millennium, of my own time. I have all these fears and other things. But I have been lucky always to be able to look upward. While trying to learn something, I have developed my own system, if one could call it that. My own breathing."
Ilona Anhava
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