CANDIDAT 2007
Anna Tuori
At first glance, Anna Tuori’s works can appear to be quietly beautiful renderings of moments of happiness. On closer inspection, this idyll begins to be undermined by various disruptive elements. Non-representational brushstrokes that remind us of the act of painting stand out from the figurative picture surface, while the beautiful landscapes cry out in their emptiness.
Against the current climate of renewal in the expressive tradition in painting, Tuori’s choices of subject matter, painterly gestures and styles feel both brave and fresh. With an equal lack of compromise she avoids cooking up some pseudo-conceptual soup, and gives the painting room to happen. She plays with expressive gestures, and yet this conveying of emotion does not override the conscious process. The paintings have no hierarchy dividing the representational from the non-representational. The works are defined by a conflict between the narrative, planned and figurative and the polyphonic, spontaneous and non-representational. For Tuori: “What is portrayed is no more significant than the material out of which it is made – the referential component of the painting is not allowed excessively to define or direct the way it is read.”
The girlish light-heartedness of Tuori’s paintings is only apparent. If anything, they are contortedly sublime works, in which the joyously wondrous is the focus of a critical gaze. As important as this attitude to and relationship with the act of painting and the painting itself is what she wants to convey with her works. They are rooted in emotional states or in memories of something that has been read, seen or experienced. In addition to her own experiences, Tuori has received important impulses, for example, from the films of Elia Kazan and the art of Caspar David Friedrich. Her paintings are in the romantic tradition, in which a landscape is also an image of an interior world. Experiences seen in films or in life – the fragmentation of memory – contain something similar to Tuori’s paintings. Her paintings do not tell some schematic tale about something seen many times over, but continually succeed in surprising the viewer.
Kari Immonen