CANDIDATE 2005
Paavo Paunu
born 1965 in Tampere, lives in Rauma
The important thing in Paavo Paunu’s works is space. Since they are frequently extremely large, they become a real space that envelops the viewer, they fill the room or tear a hole in the wall, creating a new space. Paunu also has a powerful calling to materiality: the paintings easily acquire three dimensions, ceasing to be solely illusions, images of objects.
His works frequently have a wry, enigmatic humour, yet at the same time, they have a peculiar solemnity; the red walls of the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii, fluttering drapery, stage curtains gloomily descending.
Paunu’s human figure is fragile and incomplete, frequently lost, in the grip of his own delusions of grandeur or marooned on the farthest shores of the mind. The human being has lost his identity, he hides, evaporates into nothingness. Sometimes, Paunu’s pictures contain explicit religious references, reminders of church paintings, of the endless torments of hell, of the terror of those expelled from paradise, apocalyptic visions of a universe that smoulders and burns.
Many of his works take on cosmic overtones. The Earth is no more than a hillock covered with wintry trees, heavenly bodies float like balloons on the horizon, the planets play music, the moon touches the earth, land and sky unite like a man and a woman. In Paunu’s output scale does not apply solely to the size of the works, but also to his subject matter. It is all there, the past and the future, descending to the depths and rising to dizzying heights.
Pirjo Hämäläinen