KAARLO STAUFFER

1988 | Nastola | painting

Being figurative, my paintings represent a form of realism. But should a magical element defying everyday reality appear in one of them, I regard it as a discarded out-take from my worktable, a whim pasted on as an afterthought. When painted, this discordant fragment becomes part of the whole. And then it starts to make sense.

A painting, as I see it, is a perpetually self-perpetuating relic. Artefactually, I like paintings to look archaic, conscious of the historical onus they carry as a medium. Still, I cannot deny my paintings a personal level of significance – to do so would seem hackneyed. Even when I am striving for objectivity, my mind and my choices are guided by various feelings, from pleasure to irritation, from an array of mixed desires through to indifference. The hands that paints may strive to paint mechanically, or it may choose to strip away all superfluities, and then finally it might indulge in “frivolity”: ornamentation.