• The beautifully detailed and carefully composed works of Kari Vehosalo's exhibition possess a silent atmosphere familiar from his previous pieces....

    Wanderers, 2021-22

    oil on canvas
    194 x 169 cm
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    The beautifully detailed and carefully composed works of Kari Vehosalo's exhibition possess a silent atmosphere familiar from his previous pieces. A feeling as if something terrifying is nearing, lurking around the corner. In the light of the current terrors in the world, the themes and issues the paintings stir up strike with a heavier, even more somber tone than before.

     

    Unknown pleasures in the name of the exhibition refer to the desires and enjoyments that lie unrecognized, hidden from our consciousness. In Vehosalo's paintings these pleasures manifest themselves in form of black circular holes – hovering objects or openings painted on the canvas. The subject of pleasure lies hidden under draped covers or behind a curtain, under a finger poking the skin of a shoulder. It lies blurred under a film or unattainable behind a coat of coal dust, sealed to an acrylic box. It is scattered over the ever-changing sea and stares back at us from the depths of a darkness.

     

    Pleasure and suffering can coexist, sometimes even simultaneously. The sublime splendour of the landscapes stages the scene for our enjoyment – for our pleasure, but at the same time question our false sense of omnipotence and place everything back to their real, terrifying proportions. It reveals our limitations and helplessness in the face of nature. Forces of nature pour over us be it in form of waves, the immense scale of the mountain scenes, trees bending in the wind or with the rising cloud formation, covered ominously with charcoal.

    Nature here, painted on canvas, doesn't always act as we expect it to. There is an extraordinary light glowing from behind what appears to be a mountain or a cliff, inexplicably floating in dark emptiness on two plates. Light from the black sun between the mountain tops doesn't fall according to the laws of physics. The subdued colour palette, matrix of black spots or the physical separation and reflection of an acrylic frame all create a distance: a little disturbance that reminds us it's a painting we're looking at, a distance that makes us alert, maybe even uneasy, but encourages to take another look, to think again.

  • photo: Jussi Tiainen (View more details about this item in a popup).
    photo: Jussi Tiainen (View more details about this item in a popup).
    photo: Jussi Tiainen (View more details about this item in a popup).
    photo: Jussi Tiainen (View more details about this item in a popup).
    photo: Jussi Tiainen (View more details about this item in a popup).
    photo: Jussi Tiainen (View more details about this item in a popup).
  • Working with carbon Working with carbon Working with carbon Working with carbon Working with carbon Working with carbon
    Working with carbon

    Kari Vehosalo uses forms of carbon in exceptional ways, mixing paint out of graphite powder or covering his paintings with a fine charcoal dust. The dual character of the substance reflects the dualistic nature of life itself, as both beautiful and dangerous, both life-sustaining as well as a manifestation of demise.

     

    To distribute the charcoal powder evenly on the painting's surface, Vehosalo experimented both by blowing the dust himself through a modified roll of carboard, and later in a manner less hazardous for his lungs: with the help of a hair dryer and a self-made applicator. The procedure required also building sealed "laboratories" to prevent the fine powder from spreading in the studio.

     

    photos: Kari Vehosalo

  • From Kari Vehosalo's studio
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    photo: Kari Vehosalo (View more details about this item in a popup).

    photo: Kari Vehosalo

  • H O L E S The viewer is confronted with various holes, openings, and coverings in the exhibition. Holes could...

    KARI VEHOSALO
    Wanderer, 2022

    oil on canvas
    60 x 47 cm

     

    H O L E S
    The viewer is confronted with various holes, openings, and coverings in the exhibition. Holes could be seen as an absence of matter, where a portion of our view disappears and black spots appear, like blind spots or eye floaters, preventing us to see what lies at the end of a forest path. They can allude to an abyss, an unescapable black hole ready to devour us, or a monolith demanding our attention. They resemble so called cigarette burns or cue marks indicating the end of a reel in an old film, signaling the need for a change. They could be black spots from gazing directly into the sun, burning blinding holes to our eyesight. As if seeing something too bright, too intense, burns a little hole into us – the kind that repeats itself as an after-image, projecting onto new canvases, images and views.


    The holes can take on an endless number of interpretations and meanings, and function as a place of contemplation for the viewer – a mystery, as Vehosalo puts it. As the holes obstruct our vision, their presence forces the viewer to imagine what lies behind them: to fill the gaps and by doing so, reflect something from themselves onto the painting and into its meanings, reflections of their fears, symptoms, and pleasures.

    The holes serve, as does the grayscale or sepia palette, in similar way as the Holbein skull or other glitches in Vehosalos earlier paintings: as ruptures in our symbolic realm. They break the painted illusion portraying itself to us as reality, and offer a path, an opening to the gaping nothingness of the Real that lies behind it. They act as mirrors, as a place for the viewer to project whatever is making its way from the subconscious. They can be seen as a lack, in the sense of a hidden desire rising from the most secret, unknown depths from within ourselves; a surplus that wells up and rises to the surface, impossible to control or attain; or as objects and issues preventing our access to the image of the landscape, denying us access to pleasure itself.

  • Kari Vehosalo, Object, 2021-22 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Kari Vehosalo, Wanderers, 2021-22 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Kari Vehosalo, Object, 2021-22 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Kari Vehosalo, Object, 2021-22 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Kari Vehosalo, Object, 2021–2022 (View more details about this item in a popup).

    Object, 2021-22

  • T H E O T H E R Kari Vehosalo's works are rich with art historical references. In this exhibition,...

    T H E  O T H E R
    Kari Vehosalo's works are rich with art historical references. In this exhibition, in addition to references to the Wanderer tradition of the Romantic era, one can trace motifs like Madonna and Child, Pietà or the representation of Doubting Thomas, in which one of the apostles pokes his finger into the wounds of Jesus, and only through this act of his own sensory experience finally believes what has indeed happened.

    In Vehosalo’s work There is a gap in between, where I end and you begin, a hand is pushing its index finger deep into a hole in an upper arm. The hand is wearing a plastic glove, suggesting perhaps of a medical procedure, and the sterility and cold nature of the 3D printing technique further adds to the distanced, clean feel of the piece. The resulting object, idealized in white and almost too perfect, is elevated on top of a pedestal: isolated in its shiny, prismatic acrylic box. The indexicality of the object functions on a different level compared to the paintings, acting more straightforwardly as an imprint of reality.

    Both the object as well as the paintings aim towards the impossible effort to reflect the Real and to reach something fundamental of our existence, glimpse by glimpse. Equally unattainable as the Real – understood here in the sense of the terrifying, unspoiled truth, remains to us the Other: we can try to understand, try to reach each other, but an inevitable distance – a gap in between, remains.

  • In process
    Process of 3D printing. photo: Kari Vehosalo (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Inside the scale model of the gallery built by the artist. photo: Kari Vehosalo (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Creating effects on the painting Still Life. photo: Kari Vehosalo (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Kari Vehosalo painting subliminal effect colours on the edges of the canvas. (View more details about this item in a popup).
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    Process of 3D printing.
    photo: Kari Vehosalo

  • VEILS AND FILMS

    The paintings are on the one hand easy to look at: they are skillfully painted and assembled – eye-pleasing, so to say, but on the other hand it seems Vehosalo very carefully and deliberately goes on and beyond to make obstacles to the process of viewing: in Still Life he paints a light, nearly transparent film on top of one painting, smudging our view. The film strips are disintegrating from its edges, and are punctured with holes – openings, that paradoxically don’t offer any clearer viewpoints. The lighter-coloured film seems to be the only thing depicted as in focus in the painting, it seems the plant and its surroundings are permanently out of reach.

     

    Blurring the borders of images refers to an idealized tradition of illustrating fairytales or fantasies, and on a larger scale, combined with the nostalgic sepia, could be read as a comment to the limits of our eyesight, formation of meaning, and to the fading limits our memory. Memories too are filled with holes, tend to fade from their edges, transform, and end up covered in dust, isolated from the reality that gave birht to them.

    Holes and films, the charcoal powder covering the surfaces, or light coming from within the painting function as a disturbing element, breaking an illusion of an image, but in some works this disturbance becomes the main feature. If curtains in an interior in some of Vehosalo’s earlier works were adding to a pressuring atmosphere of not knowing, they now take up the entire canvas and consume our imagination as a whole. Most prominently this is visible in the painting Icon nodding to Malevich, where the black void deepens towards the center as if devouring us into its darkness. As in Malevich’s square, the black here could also be seen as the representation of something sacred, or equally as the absence of it. The symbolic identification is reduced to its limits: there is nothing looking back at us, except for what we carry within us and bring to the room.

  • publication by Sara Hildén Museum
    publication by Sara Hildén Museum

    In conjuction with Kari Vehosalo's extensive retrospective exhibition at Sara Hildén Art Museum in 2021, the museum published a richly illustrated, beautiful book containing articles by the philosophers Sanna Tirkkonen and Juha Varto. The publication is available at Galerie Anhava.

     

  • Kari Vehosalo

    photo: Sakari Piippo

    Kari Vehosalo

    Kari Vehosalo (b. 1982) is a philosopher and a craftsman. His works address power, its essence and structures, and how even unconsciously the social contract steers and restricts our way of being. Polite behaviour is usually a ritual devoid of content, but nonetheless required in order to pass as a human being.

     

    Kari Vehosalo has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in Finland and internationally. An extensive mid-career retrospective was shown at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in summer 2021. In addition to private collections, he has work in several notable public collections, including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki Art Museum, Saastamoinen Foundation, Wihuri Foundation, and the Henna and Pertti Niemistö Foundation collection. Vehosalo was awarded the Ars Fennica prize in 2017.

     
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