- Venue
- James Hockey and Foyer Galleries
- Location
- South East England
A startling and mesmerising collection of paintings that precede boundaries in neither landscape nor abstraction are presented that elegantly visualise a transition in seasons, from Summer to Winter, and from nature to life.
A former student of UCA Farnham (when it was referred to as the Surrey Institute of Art & Design University College), Jaakko Mattila’s multimedia practice extends to paints, prints and watercolours to encapsulate the viewer into a world of reduced form. At times the work abstracts life, from natural leaves to night skies, and at other circumstances the various paintings, prints and installations delve into the artist’s imagination and interpretation of an art global, which would relieve viewer’s of the work’s (or their own) cultural background and social status, to genuinely produce mediocre yet expressive mark-made pieces.
The adjustment and relationship to a variety of media accentuates Mattila’s attraction to nature and light to feed spiritual needs that offer a method of escapism from an ever economically-founded art market and hyper-realistic world today. Indeed, this influence from otherworldly corners of the globe are present in the grey scale gloss paintings such as Synthesis, which whilst not necessarily dwelling in a dark vision, are reflections of human aura and a connectivity to domestic culture. The reflective surfaces provided by the gloss paint are excellent metaphorical framing devices to reveal the best and worst of ourselves, much like the famous Rorschach ink blots used in psychology.
The rather ‘postmodern’ palette in Mattila’s colourful and sensuous pieces such as Landscape (Summer) or Circle seem to acknowledge a digital and Information-Age world, whereby the sharing of images and emotions (nicknamed emoticons) appear as substitutes for root-questions from existential and metaphysical reasons for being, to modes of technology, all of which Mattila comprehensibly evaluates with truly vibrant and lasting medium manipulation. Another fairly ‘postmodern’ aspect to Mattila’s practice is his technique of bending boundaries between his media and subject matter such as in the case of Everything and Nothing, which actually presents what look to be two distinct artworks; a painting and a sculpture; but conceives a whole painting that visualises a scientific definition of art. And conception as a formula for Mattila’s themes and subject matter play again in the monumental installation of paintings Being, allowing for a birth-to-life experience of contemporary painting.
