Anna Tuori
06 Apr - 07 May 2006
ANNA TUORI
"Apparent Lightness"
At first sight, Anna Tuori's paintings may appear to be moments of happiness depicted in a readily beautiful manner. But a closer look reveals various intrusive elements that begin to undermine this apparent idyll. On the one hand, non-figurative brushstrokes recalling the act of painting emerge from the plane of the image, and on the other hand, the landscapes of beauty declare their emptiness. In an atmosphere where the expressive tradition of painting is being recycled, Tuori's choice of subject, painterly gestures and styles appear to be bold and fresh at the same time. No less compromising is her manner of refraining from creating a pseudo-conceptual mix and of giving the painting room to take place.
Tuori plays with expressive gestures, but the expression of emotions does not override the conscious process. There is no hierarchy of figurative and non-figurative in her paintings. The works are informed by the contradiction of the narrative, planned and figurative in relation to the polyphonous, spontaneous and non-figurative. The crossed connections of Shh are an excellent example. The visual themes are bordered by the decorative bands familiar from Tuori's paintings; a stand of birches in winter, a girl vacantly staring at the viewer and spades left on the edge of a last resting place are like film clips forgotten on an editing table. For the artist, the subject means no more than the material of which it is made - the part of the painting that alludes must not unduly define or steer the manner of reading.
Tuori's paintings are girlishly happy in appearance only. Instead, they are warpedly sublime works in which the wonderful is viewed with a critical eye. Just as important as this attitude and the relationship with painting and the work at hand is what she wishes to express with her works. Her paintings take as their starting points emotional states or recollections of things read, seen and expressed. Alongside her own experiences, Tuori has found important impulses in the films of Elia Kazan and the art of Caspar David Friedrich.
Tuori's paintings fall into the Romantic tradition, in which the landscape is also an image of an inner world. The Romantic attitude underscored the human ability for friendship, conversation, and correspondence, and communication with other people in general. This aroused interest in understanding and misunderstanding. (1). With their landscapes, artists of the period such as Friedrich did not wish to depict only the beauty and majestic grandeur of nature. In the background there were also concepts of the sublime - approaching the experience of horror. While evoking shock and fear, the sublime also has its appeal. Emotions of horror or fear are not always uppermost in Tuori's paintings. The beautiful landscapes, however, are tensed in expectation; things may not be bubbling under the dead calm surface, but something is happening nonetheless. In Elisa's True Dream, Tuori presents an idyllic view of precisely this kind. The dream-like landscape is beautiful and calm, while reflecting a strange latent tension. The ribbons waving in the wind from the branches of trees and the patches of colour belonging to a different register of painting only serve to underline this strange mood. A similar visual wavering is found in Melankolia (Melancholy) in which a view of a field is disrupted by a hand pushing down into the painting from its upper edge. Tuori continues to twist the visible in Dark Whistle, where skylarks exhaling pigment underline a menacing expectant mood. In its sublime strangeness, this work even gains a humorous overtone.
Tuori describes painting as a continuous quest that is most fruitful when a painting succeeds in surprising the viewer. The artist must always be prepared to encounter new and unexpected events emerging during the painting process. Tuori's thoughts on painting and being with a work of art have points in common with Hans-Georg Gadamer's writings on art and the experiencing of art. In his hermeneutics, Gadamer underlines the stunning effect of artworks - be they plays, poems or paintings - on the viewer, reader or person experiencing them. He maintains that a work of art is not just received passively; instead, the experience of art is always a dialogue. Surprise or silence, however, need not signify the end of discussion. Instead in Gadamer's terms, stunned admiration or loss of words are an outright form of speech, in which speech is by no means being terminated but instead is only about to begin. (2)
What then interrupts speech, what makes the gaze wander or understanding falter? In Tuori's art this kind of momentary interruption is achieved by the above-mentioned disturbing extra elements of the visual plane that do not "belong" there. This zigzagging of the mind and the gaze rushing here and there are, however, perhaps the most important things when considering (also) Tuori's art. Instead of seeking to unravel the meaning of the painting we should surrender to the flow of these different elements and clues of the painting.
Anna Tuori's exhibition at the Kluuvi Gallery in Helsinki in 2004 was aptly entitled Flow. Regardless of whether it refers to visual themes or the experience or creation of a painting, this term can be approached through the concept of overflow. In a sense, the works are overflowing, and the meanings, narratives and feelings accorded by them are multiplied. At best, they appeal to the viewer, telling or revealing something important about ourselves and life in general. We should make ourselves accessible in this encounter with the painting, and seek to approach it openly and without preconceptions. The painting must be allowed to take place. This temporality, the nature of the painting as an event, is present in both the viewer's and the artist's relationship to the work. The relationship may be one-sided or it may be a dialogue. At best, it is the attunement of the viewer and the subsequent and further development of various visual clues. This standing before a painting - or the making of the painting - should, however, be neither passive nor automatic.
In speaking of the process of painting, Tuori underlines precisely this kind of discursive or conversational approach. For her, a painting is not created according to any predetermined script. In addition to the artist, the painting itself defines what can be done and the shape of the work when completed. According to Tuori, the intensity of the relationship between the painting and the artist declines as the process continues. At first, the painting is close - there is a relationship with it - and gradually as the work progresses and during pauses, the artist begins to inspect it from a distance.
Anna Tuori's way of painting equally resembles a conversation or the airing of thoughts. An individual painting does not emerge only within its own frame. Instead, Tuori seeks the final painting in several works made at the same time. She eliminates certain elements and crystallization or perfection will then take place in one of the works. This shaping of a painting in other works is not, however, based on seriality. Tuori does not seek a programmatic variation of the same theme, although at first sight her paintings appear to be of a similar vein. A good example of this movement from one work to another and back again is Fugitive Kind, a painting in which young people of Tuori's Lumitanssin vaiheet (Stages of the Snow Dance) series dancing in a park of panic are accompanied by staring ghosts. The repetition of themes tells of Tuori's method. He paintings approach the experience of something seen in a film or in life, or the fragmentariness of memory. Simultaneously truth and dream.
Kari Immonen
© Anna Tuori
BEFORE NOON, 2006
acrylic and oil on canvas
155 x 145 cm
"Apparent Lightness"
At first sight, Anna Tuori's paintings may appear to be moments of happiness depicted in a readily beautiful manner. But a closer look reveals various intrusive elements that begin to undermine this apparent idyll. On the one hand, non-figurative brushstrokes recalling the act of painting emerge from the plane of the image, and on the other hand, the landscapes of beauty declare their emptiness. In an atmosphere where the expressive tradition of painting is being recycled, Tuori's choice of subject, painterly gestures and styles appear to be bold and fresh at the same time. No less compromising is her manner of refraining from creating a pseudo-conceptual mix and of giving the painting room to take place.
Tuori plays with expressive gestures, but the expression of emotions does not override the conscious process. There is no hierarchy of figurative and non-figurative in her paintings. The works are informed by the contradiction of the narrative, planned and figurative in relation to the polyphonous, spontaneous and non-figurative. The crossed connections of Shh are an excellent example. The visual themes are bordered by the decorative bands familiar from Tuori's paintings; a stand of birches in winter, a girl vacantly staring at the viewer and spades left on the edge of a last resting place are like film clips forgotten on an editing table. For the artist, the subject means no more than the material of which it is made - the part of the painting that alludes must not unduly define or steer the manner of reading.
Tuori's paintings are girlishly happy in appearance only. Instead, they are warpedly sublime works in which the wonderful is viewed with a critical eye. Just as important as this attitude and the relationship with painting and the work at hand is what she wishes to express with her works. Her paintings take as their starting points emotional states or recollections of things read, seen and expressed. Alongside her own experiences, Tuori has found important impulses in the films of Elia Kazan and the art of Caspar David Friedrich.
Tuori's paintings fall into the Romantic tradition, in which the landscape is also an image of an inner world. The Romantic attitude underscored the human ability for friendship, conversation, and correspondence, and communication with other people in general. This aroused interest in understanding and misunderstanding. (1). With their landscapes, artists of the period such as Friedrich did not wish to depict only the beauty and majestic grandeur of nature. In the background there were also concepts of the sublime - approaching the experience of horror. While evoking shock and fear, the sublime also has its appeal. Emotions of horror or fear are not always uppermost in Tuori's paintings. The beautiful landscapes, however, are tensed in expectation; things may not be bubbling under the dead calm surface, but something is happening nonetheless. In Elisa's True Dream, Tuori presents an idyllic view of precisely this kind. The dream-like landscape is beautiful and calm, while reflecting a strange latent tension. The ribbons waving in the wind from the branches of trees and the patches of colour belonging to a different register of painting only serve to underline this strange mood. A similar visual wavering is found in Melankolia (Melancholy) in which a view of a field is disrupted by a hand pushing down into the painting from its upper edge. Tuori continues to twist the visible in Dark Whistle, where skylarks exhaling pigment underline a menacing expectant mood. In its sublime strangeness, this work even gains a humorous overtone.
Tuori describes painting as a continuous quest that is most fruitful when a painting succeeds in surprising the viewer. The artist must always be prepared to encounter new and unexpected events emerging during the painting process. Tuori's thoughts on painting and being with a work of art have points in common with Hans-Georg Gadamer's writings on art and the experiencing of art. In his hermeneutics, Gadamer underlines the stunning effect of artworks - be they plays, poems or paintings - on the viewer, reader or person experiencing them. He maintains that a work of art is not just received passively; instead, the experience of art is always a dialogue. Surprise or silence, however, need not signify the end of discussion. Instead in Gadamer's terms, stunned admiration or loss of words are an outright form of speech, in which speech is by no means being terminated but instead is only about to begin. (2)
What then interrupts speech, what makes the gaze wander or understanding falter? In Tuori's art this kind of momentary interruption is achieved by the above-mentioned disturbing extra elements of the visual plane that do not "belong" there. This zigzagging of the mind and the gaze rushing here and there are, however, perhaps the most important things when considering (also) Tuori's art. Instead of seeking to unravel the meaning of the painting we should surrender to the flow of these different elements and clues of the painting.
Anna Tuori's exhibition at the Kluuvi Gallery in Helsinki in 2004 was aptly entitled Flow. Regardless of whether it refers to visual themes or the experience or creation of a painting, this term can be approached through the concept of overflow. In a sense, the works are overflowing, and the meanings, narratives and feelings accorded by them are multiplied. At best, they appeal to the viewer, telling or revealing something important about ourselves and life in general. We should make ourselves accessible in this encounter with the painting, and seek to approach it openly and without preconceptions. The painting must be allowed to take place. This temporality, the nature of the painting as an event, is present in both the viewer's and the artist's relationship to the work. The relationship may be one-sided or it may be a dialogue. At best, it is the attunement of the viewer and the subsequent and further development of various visual clues. This standing before a painting - or the making of the painting - should, however, be neither passive nor automatic.
In speaking of the process of painting, Tuori underlines precisely this kind of discursive or conversational approach. For her, a painting is not created according to any predetermined script. In addition to the artist, the painting itself defines what can be done and the shape of the work when completed. According to Tuori, the intensity of the relationship between the painting and the artist declines as the process continues. At first, the painting is close - there is a relationship with it - and gradually as the work progresses and during pauses, the artist begins to inspect it from a distance.
Anna Tuori's way of painting equally resembles a conversation or the airing of thoughts. An individual painting does not emerge only within its own frame. Instead, Tuori seeks the final painting in several works made at the same time. She eliminates certain elements and crystallization or perfection will then take place in one of the works. This shaping of a painting in other works is not, however, based on seriality. Tuori does not seek a programmatic variation of the same theme, although at first sight her paintings appear to be of a similar vein. A good example of this movement from one work to another and back again is Fugitive Kind, a painting in which young people of Tuori's Lumitanssin vaiheet (Stages of the Snow Dance) series dancing in a park of panic are accompanied by staring ghosts. The repetition of themes tells of Tuori's method. He paintings approach the experience of something seen in a film or in life, or the fragmentariness of memory. Simultaneously truth and dream.
Kari Immonen
© Anna Tuori
BEFORE NOON, 2006
acrylic and oil on canvas
155 x 145 cm