Since 1970 Jorma Hautala has been creating beautiful, poetic paintings where “the significance of colour seems more essential than ever: that is where the light of these paintings is. Often they shift by degrees from brighter to more shadowy surfaces (as in the Kamakura series) and still retain their translucency, unless they become black.”
“Hautala’s paintings are based on the oppositions of tranquil and open planes of colour, the wedges transecting them and thread-like structures of lines. Closer examination reveals more pairs of opposites, in colours (cold-warm, dark-light etc.) and composition (open-closed, line-surface, central area-margin etc.). The emotional charge radiated by these externally rational paintings arises precisely from the studied combinations pairs of opposite. ”
So that it wouldn’t be just the world
Jorma Hautala’s daily route to his studio passes through a townscape characterized by large red-brick factory buildings with glass-walled offices next to them. Right behind the buildings is the port: the cries of seagulls are mixed with the noise of traffic and the closeness of the sea can be sensed in the amount and quality of the light.
The starting point for a painting can be found along the route, for example in how the side of a building transects the horizontal morning light with shadows marking sharp wedges. A momentary observation grows in the artist’s mind, becoming palm-sized sketches becoming mixed, as the work progresses with recollections of other experiences and other works, by the artist and others.
The drawings are followed by gouaches, in which the colours and composition of the future painting gain more precision. The original observation, the recollections that it arouses and the visual structure required for the work to be successful come together. The final painting on canvas is the termination of one working process. It can also be the beginning of another one. It is a place to pause.
Browsing backwards through Hautala’s art, all the way to the 1970s, one notes its uniform span passing through the decades. He has not taken any sudden turns nor let himself be lured by fashions. He has set his own parameters and progressed within them.
Change in Hautala’s art has implied deliberate progress towards expression that is continually becoming more precise, and at the same time lighter – in Italo Calvino’s words “the lightness of meditativeness”, a crystallization from which all cloudiness and heaviness have been honed away.
Because of its consistent nature, Hautala’s oeuvre can also be viewed as a life-long stream, a process in which each individual work becomes part of a broader entity. Many of his works are reflections of other works, sometimes from many years earlier, or the return to some theme that was left unfinished. Who was it who said that an artist works on just one painting all his life?
But it is not easy to name another artist, whose paintings would so different within such a closely defined visual language. Hautala develops a growing number of themes that he often executes as chromatically or compositionally opposite pairs or groups of works. Creative improvisation and explicit planning intermesh in a method that finds comparisons in music, both jazz and classical.
Hautala’s paintings are based on the oppositions of tranquil and open planes of colour, the wedges transecting them and thread-like structures of lines. Closer examination reveals more pairs of opposites, in colours (cold-warm, dark-light etc.) and composition (open-closed, line-surface, central area-margin etc.). The emotional charge radiated by these externally rational paintings arises precisely from the studied combinations pairs of opposite.
Hautala’s paintings do not represent anything beyond themselves; they are purely and uncompromisingly visual. They exist and that is enough. Moreover, they offer a great deal of visual pleasure, i.e. beauty.
While Hautala’s paintings arouse strong (albeit quite “abstract”) emotional and sensory experiences, they will also show the observant viewer how those experiences are constructed. Hautala condenses his subjective observations of his own landscape into an art that touches our collective consciousness. His paintings maintain and specify our ability to perceive the world. Or in his words:”… so that it wouldn’t be just the world.”
A Responsive Wanderer in an Urban landscape
A mind that looks for familiar shapes or figures, symbols, explanations or other such ‘grips of the world’ can feel helpless when confronted by Jorma Hautala’s paintings: these are pictorial spaces that refrain from turning into verbal spaces. To the lyricist’s metaphor apparatus they seem to say: find if you can, but our presence needs nothing more than the verb to be. Still, they could be considered as challenges, for these pictures by no means turn their backs on you. They open out powerfully and intimately towards the viewer.
Hautala has from the very beginning represented for me absolute painting in the same sense as absolute music. Relying on ones vision one enters a ‘landscape’ that has to be witnessed and can be analysed only through itself. What the viewer experiences is a transition into a space that by looking transforms from a two-dimensional to a more and more three-dimensional space. In Hautala’s pictures there always seems to be as much space as the eye and the consciousness are prepared to take in.
The significance of colour seems more essential than ever: that is where the light of these paintings is. Often they shift by degrees from brighter to more shadowy surfaces (as in the Kamakura series) and still retain their translucency, unless they become black. Hautala’s pictures nevertheless feel always solid, reliable in a way that never leaves one out on a limb or lost. Even when light and airy they have weight which comes from overcoming matter, they allow the viewer to breathe. The colour surfaces are restful like nature; the tension of the lines brings the artist’s intellect into play.
There are now perhaps fewer sharp lines representing ‘action’ than before. In some of the works symmetrical dotted lines add an extra dimension of both firmness and porousness. The surface dividing into two halves of equal size but different colour and line-structure brings a quiet drama to some of the pictures. When looking at one of them, Jorma Hautala ruminated that a human face is also divided vertically into two halves and that these halves are not identical. It came to my mind how fundamentally man was the ultimate yardstick of these paintings: a perceptive and responsive wanderer in an urban, industrialised, landscape surrounded by the sea. In the landscape that forms his daily route. Its beauty knows no great gestures. It simply steps forward into view.
More Work by Jorma Hautala
Images and text from Galerie Anhava.
