OUTSIDE IN

During the summer of 1997 - from July 12 through September 29 - there was a presentation of sculpture and painting from Finland.

In the Drechtoevers Open Air Museum/Sculpture Park, in Zwijndrecht, large sculptures were exhibited. The Museum of Modern Art De Rietgors in neighboring Papendrecht presented paintings and small sculptures from July 12 through September 7.


THOUGHT AND PERCEPTION
by Juhani Pallasmaa
architect, Professor

The inherent tension between oppositions is the shared concern of the five artists from Finland exhibiting in the Netherlands. The artists do not form a formal artistic group or a distinct school of thought. Their varied artistic approaches are, however, engaged in borderline perceptual phenomena and the fusion of observation and thought.

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Jorma Hautala

Jorma Hautala's paintings first appear as geometric constructions, nevertheless, they mediate concealed but subtle impressions of landscape with characteristic spatial layering of distance and foreground, aerial perspective and changing light. These works appear as purely retinal images, but after a prolonged encounter they convey multi-sensory impressions of silence, climatic temperature and muscular tension. But Hautala's paintings may equally well condense images of urban zeal, architectural wonders of distant cultures, or the syncopated rhythms of jazz.



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Kari Huhtamo

Kari Huhtamo's sculptures exhibit geometrical outlines, but these apparently Constructivist constructions turn distant images of organic creatures with distinct erotic undercurrents: geometry is combined with a sanguine and lush attitude to life. Huhtamo's sculptures are sculptured drawings, planar and linear events in space, and they evoke dance-like movements through enticement of bodily mimesis.



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Matti Kujasalo

The meticulously executed paintings of Matti Kujasalo are mental and visual fabrications based on pre-selected sets of elements and their predefined principles of interaction; the act of painting is a mere registration of intellectual choices and decisions. But his logic of permutation has become so complex that chance phenomena suggestive of organic forces or whims of imagination break through the layer of logic. Kujasalo's constructions are a balancing act between order and disorder, process and form, logic and sensuality, reason and fancy.



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Matti Peltokangas

Matti Peltokangas transforms massive blocks of granite laboriously into Euclidean solids. But through their textured surfaces the geometric volumes loose their solidity and frightening weight, and turn into hollow seed vessels of imaginary plants. Images of organic and mineralogical, permanence and transience fuse into each other.



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Hannu Siren

Hannu Siren's visually minimalist sculptures confront our entire sensory range. They condition the observer's experience of gravity, verticality, balance and weight. His sculptures also question the permanence of scale and distance; the volumes approach and recede and project a sense of authority at the same time that they evoke a sense of nearness through tactile information.