JAANA LAAKKONEN

1985 | Joensuu | painting
www.jaanalaakkonen.com

My key preoccupation is painting as an event – as an action in time and space, an encounter. I am awed by the relationship that a painting can form with its viewer and thus with the world: with the current moment, with art history, the experiential plane, the visible, the tangible, the known. I am forever fascinated by the simultaneous directness and malleability of how paintings communicate, the way a painting suggests that it irrefutably transcends the verbal, while at the same time conveying its message in an oblique, circuitous, roundabout, implicit manner, following its own logic. I labour, observe, slow down, detour, return, strive – patiently and impatiently – to find a meaningful way for the painting to live in the moment. Could a painting be a polyphonic chorus, history-conscious and corporeal, intuitive yet premeditated, conceptually precise, yet open to interpretation, self-contained, yet without denying the outside world or the subject?

Tahmeaa valoa | 2013 | 87 x 84 cm | oil on mdf