Kati Immonen: Beside the Point
Helsinki Contemporary, Helsinki
February 7 - March 3, 2014
Beside the Point is about dealing with things, formulating them and re-shaping them in a way that is deliberately something other than the thing itself. It is simultaneously more and less, too little and, at the same time, much more than enough – of the point. The nitty-gritty, and well-meaning, but persistent questioning of it.
Beside the Point is an exhibition, its title. In Kati Immonen’s case Beside the Point is a gallery exhibition in which, using the means of painting and assimilating its possibilities, and creating within them, there is a focus on everyday phenomena, everyday moments, which go by, but sting us, bite us, as they pass.
Kati Immonen’s medium for painting is the aquarelle, i.e. the transparent watercolour. A choice, and the consequences of going deeper into and developing that choice are now present, on offer. The benefits and the quality of the paintings in Kati Immonen’s second exhibition at the gallery are outstandingly evident. It is superb, the way that Immonen is able to use and handle her chosen medium – colours, forms, in levels of narrative that are mutually articulated, in a movement from the figurative to the abstract, and back.
“Watercolour forces you to make some sort of plan or decision about the painting in advance – you don’t get the white paper back once you have gone and put your paws on it. This has been a relief to me, a kind of decisiveness and limitation of the possibilities, the fact that you can’t go on endlessly changing and wavering and putting off decisions about the direction of the painting.“A sort of common denominator for my paintings could be using the properties of watercolour, its lightness, translucency, and the cultural baggage related to innocuousness, as part of the working process. In that sense, my working process has not really changed a great deal over the years, even if my subjects and focus of interest have varied. I suppose my working process has taken a roundabout route: sometimes, I feel like just painting and enjoying the colours with no more significant content than that, sometimes, I get inspired by working via some theme or other.”
Beside the Point is commonplace. It raises and lowers, makes special, those commonplace events, those countless moments whose value we rarely have time to acknowledge. Kati Immonen grabs hold of and takes pleasure in the successes and excesses of the everyday. What emerge are comments and utterances that demonstrate that the everyday is not just sublime, but also trivial, very trivial. Kati Immonen deals with something we all have, our quite incomprehensible ability to quibble and grumble, moan and complain – over nothing.
The lightness of the works, the nearness and simultaneous depth of their colour world take us into everyday scenes, in which they are exposed to the light somewhere between both a shared sense of shame and insightful detachment. There, between and by way of experiences that combine images of nature; for example, fish that are both human and alien, and works that come close, get under the skin, without our noticing it.
There follows an awakening, a moment of clarity. We are not laughing at anyone, we are laughing at ourselves, and we are laughing together.
Quotations from a conversation between Mika Hannula and Kati Immonen
The exhibition coincides with the publication of Kati Immonen’s book Talvisatu (Winter Tale).
HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY
Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki
