Jukka Rusanen
The work of Jukka Rusanen (b. 1980) represents a form of contemporary art that reflects upon its own boundaries and conventions. Rusanen’s experimental paintings often expand into spatial and sculptural installations or, most recently, into videos. Yet he restricts his thematics strictly to issues that involve painting, searching for the essential character of painting through its own tradition. In recent years, Rusanen has explored Rococo painting in his work, its style, idiom, palette and approach to subject matter. His own approach makes use of exaggeration, playing with impressions of weight and lightness, and also drawing attention to normative definitions of things such as the boundary between the feminine and the masculine. "There is something excessive in my paintings in all their grotesqueness, something that does not attend to reason, but emphasises instead the individual experience and pleasure," the artist says. Just as in his painting installation for OPEN, “It’s Life’s Illusion I Recall” (2007), Rusanen’s works underline a seductively bodily and physical level of the "here and now". In this work, too, the viewer is led to historical and above all imaginary moods, where the individual’s sense of time and rational thinking ultimately disintegrate into absurd experiences of vanity: the seductive material transports the viewer to the border between the possible and the impossible. The work is like a naked painting that has moved from its original place and drifted to a random environment, where it becomes available for public perusal and encounter.
