Group OOO
Kaarina Haka, Tapani Hyypiä, Maaria Märkälä, Maaria Oikarinen, Matti Rantanen, Panu Ruotsalo, Mia Saharla
5.3. – 20.3.2016
Galleria Huuto Jätkäsaari – Jätkä 1 and Jätkä 2
We paint with all our senses, memories and emotions. A painting is a free space, a room, a continent and a galaxy. Anything can happen. The abstract eliminates the boundaries and laws of the visible world. The color explodes. We create harmonies and compositions. A painting speaks in tongues, we run across the canvases. We write depictions of moments with thin and thick paint. We carve the color and we scrape it off. We let wide movements lead us. We are accurate down to the smallest detail and manically wild.
The impulse to paint may come from the fluorescent yellow color of a traffic sign, the serpentine tapes of old cassettes, a construction site, a storm or a breakfast avocado or from snow blindness or from the millennia of art history.
The Group OOO was created on the basis of painting discussions, around painting, focusing on the abstract and its meaning to each painter. Each of the group’s artists has an individual approach to painting, circulating on the edges and at the core of abstract painting, bringing together the necessity of painting and the ability of a painting to speak without words. As the visual reference disappears, the painting emphasizes gestures, colors and emotions. This has to be done. This is important. Painting doesn’t end and what is painted doesn’t end. What one sees, what one doesn’t see. What one feels, breathes and tastes. What colors there are.
Kaarina Haka
“My work is an installation that plays with lines. It consists of nets, wire and shadows.”
Tapani Hyypiä
“The wandering of an exhausted mind, the experience offered by an old painting or observations about nature give the initial stimulus, as if by chance. Often it is enough that there is a desire to spread the color and wonder how two together are more than those two.”
Maaria Märkälä
“I test the boundaries of abstract art in the spirit of Georg Baselitz.”
Maaria Oikarinen
“My large paintings refer to the Holocaust as well as the conflict between Israel and Palestine. These themes emerged when I was studying in Jerusalem during the summer of 2015.”
Panu Ruotsalo
“In my works I build a bridge between figurative and abstract forms of expression, attempting to explain why abstract is a more accurate way to tell about something than figurative – for me.”
Mia Saharla
“My paintings are collages of observations and sketches. My aim is to approach painting without strict rules and frameworks, to go beyond a clear visual reference.
Matti Rantanen
“With my paintings I wanted to create an illusion of a three-dimensional appearance on a two-dimensional surface by means of abstract imagery.”
