Hannu Palosuo And The Reminiscence Of Being Human
Rome. November 1999. RipArte, a Contemporary Fine Arts fair at the Sheraton Hotel. A Sicilian Gallery, Musumeci from Catania, introducing works by a Finnish artist living in Rome called Hannu Palosuo. I had actually met him briefly in Finland some months prior and had made up a meeting with him the next time I would come to Rome, so I was familiar with the name.
A hotel room in Rome with two paintings on the wall. Two small paintings of a group of chairs, closely arranged as on a stage with the light dramatically on them from straight above. Painted in dark blue, brown and black. They immediately caught my eye and I was intrigued. There was something more there, something was shown and not shown at the same time. I started thinking, reminiscensing, thinking in nostalgic terms – as if I was looking at a photograph. It seemed to me to be a portrait of a family gathering, and yes there were two chairs in the middle facing us and each had three chairs facing them. Everything was symmetrically placed, one big gathering or a smaller one with its mirror image? And because of the somewhat particular stage light each chair had a dramatic, dark shadow beneath it. Then I noticed the name, “The portrait of a marriage I and II”, dated Roma ottobre 1999. It was a marriage portrait! A joyous occasion with the happy couple being admired by their friends and relatives.
This feeling of recognition in Hannu Palosuo’s works has followed me ever since. I have now followed his career for ten years, a decade of changing styles and motifs but never leaving the most essential part. The sensing of something that is not there, the reaching for this something, the longing and the nostalgia – the memory. Ten years like everyone knows can be a long time in an artistic life, and I have seen Palosuo’s paintings going from this dark palette through shining white and light blue via the precious materials of gold, silver and bronze back to yet again dark blues and almost sinister dark blackish-blue in combination with something altogether new, the naked brown canvas. Ups and downs, trials and errors, experiments and success, this is the endless life of an artist. Because a ready artist does not exist, it is a métier in which one always has to develop and improve, to challenge and overcome new quests. Quests mainly put out by oneself, always a competition mostly against oneself.
I have seen the motifs changing from empty chairs, through the combination of chairs and shadows to houses, windows and doors to, most recently, trees, tree trunks and tiny, fragile plants and weeds. But the central theme is always there, the motif is only something that enables us to see something else. While our eyes are engaged in the act of seeing and our mind is enjoying the beauty our souls starts remembering. And thus we bring something from our own lives to the painting, which in turn enables us to interpret them according to our own situation and our own lives. We do not only see what the artist painted but also a part of ourselves.
This is possible because Hannu Palosuo only paints what is dear to him, things and places that he has visited, that have meant something to him or to people in his surroundings, to his friends or relatives, in short: things that matter. This quality is somehow being embedded in the painting and is left there for us to discover if we only have the inclination or will to do so. This is also why the paintings keep living with us, because as we develop and change, so do they. We can always bring something new to them or stay with the initial feeling, that is our choice but it means that the number of interpretations only grow by time.
In the year of 2000 Palosuo painted a series of paintings called “All the Chairs of My Life”. Still painted in the blue palette it consists of fifteen paintings, each portraying a different kind of chair. These are still rendered as being on stage, painted in light blue over a dark fond with only the chequered floor indicating any kind of spatial concern. The chairs take on different individualities and the group altogether seem like a portrait of some theatrical society, incorporating all sorts of individuals. Seen as a whole the chairs take on almost human forms, a portrait of fifteen different people, fifteen different souls. While painting the painter dreamt of the series of paintings being displayed in a dining room, behind real chairs. And actually, this is how the group is hung making it a perfect centrepiece of discussion at any given dinner party. There is always at least one chair, always something somewhere that one can associate to and perhaps identify oneself with. Plus it always serves as an entertaining lesson in the history of interior decorating styles for those not so acquainted in that field.
At the same exhibition with the chairs mentioned above Hannu Palosuo exhibited the only portraits of people seen en face that I have come across, called “We Leave Behind”. They were based on old family photographs and show an intimacy that also touches the series “All the Chairs of My Life”. Since then, the only actual people that I have seen are shown from behind or as mere shadows, a thing that started out from the chairs. At first, as I have mentioned, the chairs were portrayed as on stage, with the light from above rendering only a small shadow beneath each but suddenly in the beginning of the new millennium the shadows started to grow. Together with the changing direction of the light the shadows started to have a life of their own, often occupying a much bigger part and more central role in the painting than the chair itself. Also the chairs sometimes started to move, they were no longer static, but told of an energy, sometimes an unease, an anxiety or a possible chaos, a disturbance or at least a strong mind of their own.
At this point also the background started to have a life of its own, it was often covered in gold, silver or bronze. This reminiscence of the old art of icons, where holy men and women are portrayed as truly glorified, as beings passed over from this world to eternity against the precious background of gold or silver. They are not portrayed as living, but already transfigured, encompassing the essence of their being. They are there, we see the human but we also see so much more, we see what is there but we can also grasp something that is beyond reach. All this is made possible by pure simplification and a focus on the main theme, leaving out all that is superfluous.
In Palosuo’s paintings there is a chair instead of the saint, but with regard to what is said above about the symbol of the chair in his paintings and the relationship to humanity as well as the slowness of time and the static in the paintings the comparison does not seem as far fetched as it at first thought perhaps might. I’m not saying that they are sacred, but there sure is a serene and meditative essence about the works. These are paintings that invite you to take your time to indulge in them and perhaps even further. Also, these are paintings where a narrow palette, i.e. only a few colours used, as well as the search for simplicity and the true essence is essential. As I see it, already the very limited choice of colours and the often repeated motif tell us that the artist is on the search for the most simple and thus truth itself.
This simplicity along with the feeling of slowness, even timelessness and for example the long and seemingly uncontrollable shadows might be the reason for the often seen interpretation in Italy of Palosuo’s paintings as being embedded with the Scandinavian or even Russian concept of slow time. According to the Italians, and most probably true, we have a much slower way of life over here in the North. Not to mention static. The Italians see this, but then again, you have to be apart in order to be able to really see.
Slowly, out of the shadows of the chairs, there started to grow figures. We could see a painted chair and on top of it sitting, portrayed only as a shadow, a person, perhaps an earlier owner. In the series “Happy Days” we have a wide variety of coloured upholstery and wooden chairs rendered in painting against a white fond. The shadow itself is made up of grey cement, sometimes showing the canvas itself. In the “In Silence Dreams are Hidden” series we see this developed. Palosuo starts to play with parallel worlds, the painted as if touchable object of the chair, the memory of the shadow and the background, all executed in different media. At this point his work starts both to get more complicated as well as to search for simplicity. In the series “The Rest of Nothing” also the shadow is painted, but the background is left untouched, what we see is the mere canvas. Palosuo starts to play for real with the illusion of painting, if all we actually ever see is only paint, why not let the raw material, the canvas itself be one layer of the painting?
March 2007. Schoenberg’s opera Erwartung at Teatro La Fenice in Venice. The stage decor used paintings by Hannu Palosuo in a most inventive way. But there were no chairs, this time he had as motifs trees and tree trunks as well as our dwellings. The most often occurring house in Palosuo’s paintings, a two-storey wooden villa with high chimneys, is actually his grandparents’ summerhouse by a lake in central Finland, the place where he spent his childhood summers. In his paintings, the villa seems empty, almost deserted, less for some nocturnal variations where the many windows seem to have an inviting, warm light. It is with the houses and trees as with the chairs: this artist paints things and places that are near and dear to him, his relatives or friends. In other words things or places that exist or have existed and mattered.
When Palosuo started painting landscapes there were no wide vistas or open skies. Palosuo’s take on the landscape is a well arranged, closely sealed part of one rather cultivated than wild forest. The composition is balanced, close-up and very theatrical. The carefully arranged tree trunks and the dark foliage covering them lead us to the theatre stage itself, to its decors. The narrow palette, mostly being blue and dark blue suggests us nocturnal scenes. The alternative, pale white, gives them an airy, foggy quality, almost unreal – or the feeling of old, paled photographs. There is at the same time something familiar and something uncanny about them. Like the forest they are at the same time sheltering and intimidating. You cannot take your eyes out of them.
Palosuo has continued his painting of trees and they have gone towards a simplification. In the year 2007 he painted an impressive diptych, named “Denying One’s Destiny”, consisting of two huge canvases featuring bare tree trunks. The only, tiny, diversion to the strong vertical lines are some tiny leftovers of sprigs. The use of diptychs as well as triptychs foretold the idea of works in series, a thing very essential for Palosuo. His paintings seem to be born under a bigger idea, a whole concept at the time. This is also something that is seen in his naming of works, which clearly is important for him, they often come in groups under a bigger theme.
Once he started involving the canvas the road was clear. With just two colours there were three possibilities: the brown canvas itself, all the blue tones and the light white. In combining these three, painting the very same motif three times and placing them next to one another, he accomplishes a wide and changing variety of modes and feelings. The idea of repetition and the impact it has, as we know, is very strong. This concept is well seen in the series “When the Truth Lies” from 2006, where the same motif is seen in three different renderings.
However, a couple of years later he already places together a series of different motifs under the same title and groups them interestingly together as a whole. One of his latest works, and one that he actually still keeps adding pieces to, “My Life was a Burning Illusion” from 2008, is by now made up of a couple of dozens of paintings and the motifs vary from a tree in full bloom to bare tree trunks to tiny plants and a young boy swinging. The combination I saw was made up of twelve pieces and I realized the endless possibilities in combining and arranging the canvases in a way one chooses for oneself. Also another thing hit me, now that he combined different motifs he could no longer combine various colour schemes, these are all painted in different tones of blue against the brown canvas itself.
The combination of motifs as well as the introduction of a human figure makes us, as viewers, want to read a story into the pictures. Maybe the time for only longing, that so often characterized the empty chairs, houses and trees, now is over? Perhaps the artist starts to put all the elements together to tell us the whole story? Then again, I’m sure that he will continue to hold on to his delicate art of only hinting at solutions, leaving the last interpretation to us, allowing us to bring ourselves to the paintings. With his series of paintings, that each consist of multiple layers or worlds he only builds a stage for us to climb up to and inhabit ourselves, the way we wish to.
A completely new element emerged at the beginning of 2008 juxtaposing the strong, thick tree trunks: tiny, delicate wild plants and ordinary weeds. These flowering plants sway on thin stems and seem to be blowing with the wind. They are outspokenly beautiful and romantic, but at the same time they tell of their strong will to break out of the earth, to survive, develop and bloom while reaching up towards the heaven like the trees themselves. Big or small, the artist sees and captures it all with the same interest.
The plants and the fact that the motif itself was the only unpainted part of the canvas led to a new realization. In “Ne me quittes pas – un Requiem” Palosuo has changed the way of looking at his paintings. We see a window, where the frame, the thing closest to us as viewers and our world is again unpainted canvas, a void. This untouched frame leaves a dark shadow on the painted background, the existing world with space and depth as opposed to our void one, making our world the illusion. In these paintings the real interest lies not on the surface of the painting, so to say, but beyond, in a world we can only try reaching for. So, how appropriate is it then not, that the motif itself should be a window, a thing through which we can see the world beyond as well as something meant to be opened?
Truth and beauty. Through all times there have been artists looking for the truth in beauty. In Finland there were at the end of the 19th C artists like Ellen Thesleff, who started as a symbolist but turned a true colourist at the beginning of the 20th C as well as Hugo Simberg, who was engaged in his fantasy world, which for all we know could be truer than ours. Anyway, he always added to his imaginary themes some real features or elements from his summer retreat near the Russian border. In this way reality and fantasy came to meet at a very concrete level.
Here we have one comparison between Hannu Palosuo and other, earlier Finnish artists, as well as Finns by large. The Finn who, at least in childhood, has been fortunate enough to be able to enjoy his summertime at a villa in the archipelago or a cottage by the lakeside will carry this memory within for as long as he shall live. It will be a treasure trove from which to take out all kinds of things, feelings and memories. Perhaps it is because of the very short and light summers and the very long and dark winters that we, the people up North, treasure summertime so intensely. In the Finnish language there actually exists an old counting of age in the number of summers one has experienced. The nature is more accessible to us summertime - and it is in nature that we find our balance.
Pia Maria Montonen, 2008
