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About working To create and destroy oneself time after time through painting is demanding. It’s useless to expect that art always heals or improves you. Painting as action has become a fluctuation of consuming and healing – breathing movement that measures time. The direction of this wave is silence. This impenetrable silence is an important element in a picture, especially in a painting. Something happened, now something resembles something. But it’s all about nature - it doesn’t represent anything by its existence. I recognize it as a form, not as a symbol, and almost call it “emptiness”. I perceive figurative as abstract. Even the fact that I can create a recognizable image of a human being is amazing for me and a sufficient reason for working. But painting is not a representation. The figure in a painting is real through its change, that is, life. I recognize it as our nameless and selfless, collective body. Paint and collage layers and their living in the painting are the layers in us. Layers destroy the previous ones and birth of the new can’t exist without death of the old. Change and the life that follows are inevitable. Taming the material in painting is focused work where apparent beauty isn’t a reason to cease to a certain state or ugliness a reason to travel away from another. Therefore natural silence is something that comes to be only by concentrating on the big picture and not clinging to visible layer. I don’t consider my works provocative and I don’t aim at any particular feeling. Actually I try to clear the picture from feelings and meanings. My relation to painting and the content of my work are the same. I’d say that my current works process things that squeeze us to a corner and at the same time liberate us. I see those things to be the relation with the changing and emptiness, the suchness of reality without meanings attached to it. There’s no emotion or meaning in the emptiness. We’re used to see the emptiness only as a space or pause between meaningful things. There’s this strive to suck the unknown clean so that we could unify, so that oceans and abysses wouldn’t separate us. But that which is sucked hollow, is still empty and it penetrates always everything, even us. The emptiness isn’t in the gaps or in the margin. It is right in the middle even it appears in endless forms. This kind of reality as such is the only target of a painting. But the reality as such isn’t only the visual reality. Painting can include the knowledge of the whole body. That is immediate thinking by doing, the action of a unified mind and body. The image of a human is naturally a convenient tool for doing this. A completed painting is silent. If it is silent, the essential appears in all themes. Silent image is a sound in the viewer. By identifying with the figure in a painting, I reflect myself and you to it. Painting starts from the reality and ends up in you. Through viewer’s eyes the reality paints the last layer in a painting, the same way it created the painter through a painting.
Reima Nevalainen |