The Truth in the Shadow

I looked around; my eyes chanced to fall upon my shadow, clean cut on the white
pavement. I stood contemplating it for a time. Finally I raised my foot to stamp on it.
But no, no! I could not. I could not stamp on my own shadow.
Which was more of a shadow, I or my shadow itself?
With a mad ferocious delight, I amused myself pushing the shadow under the wheels
of carriages, the hoofs of horses, the feet of passersby. At one moment I failed to find it
where I had been expecting, and the queer idea came to me that I might have kicked it
loose. But I turned around. It was there on the ground behind me, now.

(Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal)

The matter of identity is crucial to Pirandello.

It has happened to everyone to get rambling by shop windows and to cast a glance on our reflected image. Sometimes satisfied, sometimes disappointed. According to what the Sicilian writer Pirandello states, we have to say that too often the reflection of what we think we represent does not coincide with our imagination. Thinking about a different example, there are moments when, under the tired setting sun moving downwards and projecting long shadows on the asphalt, we look for traces of truth in those dark silhouettes that never forsake us, step by step. Mattia Pascal dramatically decides to delete his own shadow. The metaphor is centred on the character’s double life, forced as he is to build up a new and fictitious identity. Going back to the lifelong question. What is truer, what we see or our projection into the world? The subjects painted by Hannu Palosuo bear the sense of such a question. With their double reflection, they look for evidence of their existence in a shadow. Their inner part and what is out of focus intertwine, complying with the artist’s fascination with the themes of time and memory. In Palosuo’s conception the shadows, besides making objective the presence of the subject in itself, are turned into metaphors of a suspended intermission. If the figures in paintings apparently vanish inside colours akin to those used by Gerhard Richter, just like old, faded-out photos, or exposed to the action of acids taking their colour away, the shadows are clean-cut and definite. Within a mirror à la Dorian Gray, they condense the soul and conquer the transience of nature.

It is not by chance that most of the characters painted by Palosuo refer to Quadri Specchianti realized on aluminium foil by Michelangelo Pistoletto from the Sixties onwards, a goal accomplished after having made more and more reflecting the dark background of his previous paintings. Just like the mentor of Arte Povera, Palosuo includes in his artworks the abstract time dimension of present, past and future. His snapshots are set in an indeterminate time: a time which slips out into the vibrant colour spread in spatulas (present), a time which remains, nitid, in the shadow (past), a time which we do not know (future), and which needs to find its very place in the rough canvas, waiting to be painted.

The flowers, on the contrary, belong to a universe gone pop, like those by Andy Warhol or by Robert Mapplethorpe. Genre painting (or photography), just like the nudes, constant presence in many a contemporary artist, maybe because of that iconic semantic opposition dwelling inside nature, between love and death. In a bunch of flowers come together elegance and menace, truth and fiction, nature and ornament. We then think about Jeff Koon’s roses, once more about Richter’s tulips, and also about the bunches that Hans-Peter Feldmann hung on the wall, with shadows tracing patterns on the same walls.

Palosuo’s frames, be they roses, lilies, tulips, aged couples, young single women, well dressed men, are at the crossroads between photography and cinema, between theatre scenes and sheer painting. By means of the faded-away use of motion, the interplay of depth and truth bestowed onto the medium, the alternation of full and empty spaces, positive and negative, reality and fiction, and thanks to the use of light not only as a compositional element, but as a veritable subject, Palosuo reflects a semantic complexity renovating painting and its old emotion and poetic charter.

The Finnish artist cherishes formal perfection, and this is the reason why his paintings look precious, not at all casual, following a process of stylistic evolution in the choice of techniques and media. The color worked by spatulas, like the tracks typical of the photo technique of panning, the use of oil mixed with magnesium components in order to preserve the fluid nature of colors, and of iron dust altering chromatic tones with the combined action of an oxidizer, as well as the choice of acrylic paints made with different materials, more resistent and more ductile than oil. Not to mention the painstaking selection of the media and their accurate preparation: rough jute cloth takes the place of more refined linen; sometimes it is used on its reverse side, sometimes it is treated, other times it is substituted by velvet cloths or by coffee sacks, with their own drawings and stamps.

Very few painters equal Palosuo’s mastery of techniques. His quest is aimed at a sort of alchemic balance between subject and treatment of materials. This is the starting point of an artistic conception which, in its eternal repetition, always seems different to us. Borrowed from a contemporary iconography, Palosuo’s themes – flowers, men, trees – belong to that “forest” of images that – as signaled by the artist – “every Finn keeps and carries inside”.

Hannu Palosuo was born in Helsinki in 1966, yet he studied in the shadows of Fori Imperiali and of Coliseum. After the Academy he chose to settle down in Rome where, as a painter “of flowers and woods”, he experienced the natural fascination derived from his North-European origins, still lingering in his own visual imagination. He turns down the hot Mediterranean sun, privileging a color range of colder hues, as well as a poised synthesis of subjects. As it had occurred in the music of great Scandinavian classical composers, from Jean Sibelius to Edvard Grieg, Hannu Palosuo drenches his characters in a ghostly and sometimes mystic light, which leads them into an ecstatic and motionless environment. Those who dwell inside his paintings are caught within the still frame of an action that has just occurred or that is to happen. They are film subjects and, if we agree that cinema is built around a multiplicity of shadows, also Palosuo’s figures live condensed inside geometric projections catching their innermost truth. As in evocative Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola, the shadow apparently shows the truest side of the protagonist in the flesh. Palosuo’s actors similarly fade into a transience which alters their silhouette, and find their ultimate definition in their ghost. The shadow makes the projecting object easily visible. Such an approach does not differ from most XX-century avantgarde painting. From the light theories offered by Impressionism on, all the “isms” to come have modified the commonplace way of conceiving perspective and the projection of portrayed subjects. The shadow unveiled something which could not be uttered, something Freudian, otherwise to be kept secret. Let us just name the shadows in de Chirico’s surrealist landscapes, presences split from any projecting subject, or the artworks by other North-European painters, from Irish Francis Bacon to Norwegian Edvard Munch. In Munch’s Puberty, a young woman sitting on the bed projects an unnatural silhouette behind her, filled with omens far from being childish or puerile.

Here lies the clue to interpret Palosuo’s paintings. The truth lies in the shadows multiplying and mirroring the time of the story. Let us not be deceived by close-ups. What fades, what remains is its reflection.

Luca Beatrice • 2013