CANDIDATE 2004

Janne Räisänen

Born 1971 in Pudasjärvi, lives in Helsinki.

Janne Räisänen's painting agenda is a high-temperature melting pot of contemporary images. He has an extraordinary ability to range widely through various registers of contemporary culture. The contentual and expressional diversity of the paintings grows organically in layers. Just as though, time after time, the paintings had to colonise an uninhabited region of the earth. Räisänen has the storyteller's gift and his imagination pours out as though from a cornucopia. This is evident on both the paintings' visual and linguistic levels. As the artist says in the text written on top of his series of passport photos: "Welcome to my head."

Räisänen's artist-self comes across as a favourite child of the grotesque. In his hunger for culture he is a true glutton, a real Sesame Street Cookie Monster! He believes in recycling: German expressionism, rap music, ethno-lifestyles, football or world literature are all good sources of fuel. Subterranean beings, family jewels, grotesque mouths, hybrids, fragments of text and drip marks populate the works. The symbolic figures are often packaged in landscape-like charm. He creates his works using various painting and drawing techniques, devours the visual influences that surround him and processes them as räisänens. We could imagine the late Jean-Michael Basquiat and his contemporary the German Jonathan Meese playing on the same team. In the works high and low shake hands against a background of burlesque laughter. To the delight of the viewer the titles of the works raise the visual exultation to an even higher state of ferment: Pollock's Bollocks and a Bacon Cock as a Crucifixion (2003). The artist himself seems to be chilling out alongside us and to be getting his audience to dance beside a DJ kit. Tampere Art Museum chose Räisänen as one of its young artists of the year in 1999. In that same year, he was also selected as a candidate for the Carnegie Art Award painting competition.

Leevi Haapala