Tor Arne
08 Mar - 04 Apr 2007
TOR ARNE
Paintings 2002 - 2007
"The light of those summer nights... I thought there must be some way to capture this feeling in a painting. And sunrise, and the moment just before sunrise, the light coming into being. This is what joins us to all this, to all existence. Nowhere can you see it so purely than at sea."
Tor Arne (born 1934) is a Finnish artist almost solely known and appreciated by experts. This is infuriating, and it tells a great deal about the mechanisms of our art world. If an artist, however important, is personally not interested in publicity, his or her works may remain unknown even among connoisseurs of art. This is clearly the case with Tor Arne: he is the painter’s painter, in the same way as someone like Gunnar Björling is the writer’s writer in Finnish literature - clear, deep and uncompromising - and almost completely unknown to the public.
Underlying Tor Arne’s paintings are physical perception, landscape, experience and feeling, but they are not descriptive; they do not "represent" anything but themselves.
When a painting truly succeeds as a painting, using visual means to give the viewer a deep feeling of communion with something greater, the shared existence that we usually never attain, it is difficult to say anything sensible about it. Words seem to escape the deepest essence of such a painting, which is colour, light and their relationship with the world of experiences, our ability to experience things. Such a painting does not gossip; it is, it whispers and therefore one must calm down before it to look, feel and open up.
ALWAYS A NEW CHALLENGE
"When I was young I took up the idea that art should have its own autonomous language of form, and I worked with that goal in mind. I was regarded as quite talented in composition and treating rhythm. But by focusing on things like that I postponed, in a way, the problem of colour. It took time to understand that I could properly deal with colour only by giving up everything else, by rejecting the things that I'm too good at," notes Tor Arne.
He does not explain why the challenge of colour should be the most essential one, more important than, for instance, rhythm or composition. No arguments for things that are self-evident. Arne has concentrated on colour since the 1970s and its problem is renewed every day. Fortunately.
Miracle is the name of the challenge. The ultimate theme of Tor Arne's painting, his Mount St. Victoire, is the moment preceding dawn that makes the landscape, colours and air shimmer in an immaterial way. Arne has experienced such moments, mostly in the Finnish archipelago, seeing the light spread from the horizon, but the experience is reinforced by the awareness that it connects everything and everyone: a breeze passes over the waters and plains, sweeping the grass and leaves of trees around the world, birds flutter, monkeys gather on a river bank to bray in rhythm.
Jouko Turkka, a Finnish stage director and a genius at best, knows that he seeks the impossible in what he does. A theatrical performance is at its most magical upon completion, just before its premiere, and that is where the performances should stop. Decline steps in with the very first contact with the audience, because the actors unwittingly begin to pander to their viewers, and relying on their mannerisms they lose the unfolding towards something new to which the rehearsal process has led them.
When explaining this, Turkka does consider not for a moment what point there might be in preparing for months or years a performance that no one will see. But who says reason has anything to with it?
The absoluteness of Turkka's view and its underlying paradoxical requirement of purity are related to Tor Arne's attitude. The moment when light and colour awake is something that actually cannot be painted, while on the other hand nothing else is worth painting. A perennially renewing and fleeting theme must be approached again and again, with the aid of new insight. Insight is true at the moment when is it new, unfolding and revealing. Turning into assuredness, it becomes banal and deflated, attracting an audience to be pleased by everything that the artist already knows. The moment is past, the monkeys are silent and have gone their way, and the artist is again at a loss. But something remains on the canvas.
Martti Anhava
Paintings 2002 - 2007
"The light of those summer nights... I thought there must be some way to capture this feeling in a painting. And sunrise, and the moment just before sunrise, the light coming into being. This is what joins us to all this, to all existence. Nowhere can you see it so purely than at sea."
Tor Arne (born 1934) is a Finnish artist almost solely known and appreciated by experts. This is infuriating, and it tells a great deal about the mechanisms of our art world. If an artist, however important, is personally not interested in publicity, his or her works may remain unknown even among connoisseurs of art. This is clearly the case with Tor Arne: he is the painter’s painter, in the same way as someone like Gunnar Björling is the writer’s writer in Finnish literature - clear, deep and uncompromising - and almost completely unknown to the public.
Underlying Tor Arne’s paintings are physical perception, landscape, experience and feeling, but they are not descriptive; they do not "represent" anything but themselves.
When a painting truly succeeds as a painting, using visual means to give the viewer a deep feeling of communion with something greater, the shared existence that we usually never attain, it is difficult to say anything sensible about it. Words seem to escape the deepest essence of such a painting, which is colour, light and their relationship with the world of experiences, our ability to experience things. Such a painting does not gossip; it is, it whispers and therefore one must calm down before it to look, feel and open up.
ALWAYS A NEW CHALLENGE
"When I was young I took up the idea that art should have its own autonomous language of form, and I worked with that goal in mind. I was regarded as quite talented in composition and treating rhythm. But by focusing on things like that I postponed, in a way, the problem of colour. It took time to understand that I could properly deal with colour only by giving up everything else, by rejecting the things that I'm too good at," notes Tor Arne.
He does not explain why the challenge of colour should be the most essential one, more important than, for instance, rhythm or composition. No arguments for things that are self-evident. Arne has concentrated on colour since the 1970s and its problem is renewed every day. Fortunately.
Miracle is the name of the challenge. The ultimate theme of Tor Arne's painting, his Mount St. Victoire, is the moment preceding dawn that makes the landscape, colours and air shimmer in an immaterial way. Arne has experienced such moments, mostly in the Finnish archipelago, seeing the light spread from the horizon, but the experience is reinforced by the awareness that it connects everything and everyone: a breeze passes over the waters and plains, sweeping the grass and leaves of trees around the world, birds flutter, monkeys gather on a river bank to bray in rhythm.
Jouko Turkka, a Finnish stage director and a genius at best, knows that he seeks the impossible in what he does. A theatrical performance is at its most magical upon completion, just before its premiere, and that is where the performances should stop. Decline steps in with the very first contact with the audience, because the actors unwittingly begin to pander to their viewers, and relying on their mannerisms they lose the unfolding towards something new to which the rehearsal process has led them.
When explaining this, Turkka does consider not for a moment what point there might be in preparing for months or years a performance that no one will see. But who says reason has anything to with it?
The absoluteness of Turkka's view and its underlying paradoxical requirement of purity are related to Tor Arne's attitude. The moment when light and colour awake is something that actually cannot be painted, while on the other hand nothing else is worth painting. A perennially renewing and fleeting theme must be approached again and again, with the aid of new insight. Insight is true at the moment when is it new, unfolding and revealing. Turning into assuredness, it becomes banal and deflated, attracting an audience to be pleased by everything that the artist already knows. The moment is past, the monkeys are silent and have gone their way, and the artist is again at a loss. But something remains on the canvas.
Martti Anhava