Notes from the mouth of shadows
The 10-year history of Galleria Huuto Viiskulma will come to an end in January. The gallery on Uudenmaankatu will continue to hold exhibitions as usual and in addition Huuto will open a new exhibition space inside warehouse L3 in Jätkäsaari. The final exhibition to be held at Galleria Huuto Viiskulma will be Tuomo Rainio’s Notes from the mouth of shadows which will open on New Year’s Eve. The exhibition explores how process-like realities take shape in images.
Artist Tuomo Rainio’s (b. 1983) solo exhibition is a combination of photographs, videos and drawings. Instead of recording or presenting a moment, the images look for the space that separates two moments, the smallest possible change, noise of the world. Time moves like a wave. The wave of an event becomes stronger and rises until it reaches its peak and breaks.
Rainio’s works explore the construction and deconstruction of a picture on many levels. The dialog between the material and ideal dimensions is used for tracing a picture in a space preceding conceptual definition. Rainio employs various digital imaging and computer programming techniques in his works, tracing the smallest undivided pieces of a picture and reconstructing them to make something that is at times recognizable before they once again turn into fine pictorial dust.
This is how Rainio describes his work process: “The goal of creating a picture is unsolved. More important than the goal is the journey and the uncontrollable events encountered during it. However, you still have to be able to stop at the right moment. You have to be passively open and alert at the same time.”
A similar artistic process is mentioned in The Surrealist Manifesto: “Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur.” This request is tempting but dangerous as it guides you towards thinking about the border where man has to give up something necessary. According to French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, “one has to waste time, surrender the right to act and the power to produce.”
Where do images come from and where do they retreat back to? This question challenges one’s imagination as one has to look further ahead for the answer, one has to go to a place where one’s identity meets its border and looks at the open sea.
P.S.
André Breton has also paraphrased Victor Hugo in saying: “I still think it’s incomparably less difficult to satisfy the demands of reflection than it is to put one’s mind in the state of total receptivity, to have ears only for ‘what the mouth of shadows says’.”
Further information:
Tuomo Rainio
+358 (0)50 321 0783
tuomorainio(at)gmail.com
