CANDIDATE 2004
Anna Retulainen
born 1969 in Orimattila, lives in Helsinki.
Anna Retulainen is a painter of perception and change. For her, her subjects are not static, controllable objects, but subjects for inspection, which retain their own objecthood and stay in constant motion. In this way, she is kin to the pre-modern Paul Cézanne, to that painter of still lifes and landscapes who showed how the artist re-creates his subject, rather than just copying what she sees in front of her. Retulainen's subjects and themes are situated in the history both of art and of photography and film. In her works we see what appear to be recollections of historical crowd scenes, genre paintings or still lifes.
Retulainen has made a name for herself with her works on animal subjects, in which the viewer's perceptive skills are put to the test. Seen from close to, the works look like informalist painting whirls, in which, apart from coloured areas of density and accumulations, we can detect a rhythmic vitality. When we look at the big works from further away, we begin to see in them cowherds separating cattle or a flock of gulls diving to take their prey. Retulainen is skilled at using the means of painting to record film-like motion in a suspended image. The atmosphere approaches that of a western film or is reminiscent of Hitchcock's The Birds. The bird's eye perspective gives viewers a thrilling surprise, and prompts them to look again for the possibilities of perception.
The subjects of Retulainen's painterly investigations are the distances, dimensions, surfaces and depths produced by the masses in the painting. The method is the same as if she had exposed lots of film frames on top of one another in a single picture. The same spirit of Edward Muybridge, who is known for his studies of motion, is also there in Retulainen's later paper-based painting installations. Here, the subject is a dog's spinning orbit as it tries to catch its own tale! Retulainen's latest still-life paintings carry on her variations on the theme. In them, too, the staticness of the painting is called into question. She propels the elements in her still lifes - grapes, bananas and red onions - into wave-like motion. At times, it looks as though the vegetables were vanishing beneath the painting's enticing surface, and rising into view again after an instant. Conjuring tricks done on painterly terms!
Leevi Haapala