Opening up an ambiguous void

Päivi Takala’s paintings allude to realistic figurativeness. Perception interpreted into the language of painting is nonetheless filtered by reproductions, media imagery. The cropping of shots is not composed into harmonious proportions, but instead the obvious subject is bluntly placed right in the middle of the painted surface. The colours are faded with white throughout, unless limited completely to tones of black or white. In places the whiteness constructing the visual theme is sly; it is sheer white ground simultaneously constructing and piercing the image. In some cases the whiteness completely erases both the image and the marks of painting. The artist makes room for emptiness.

Fragments of various events are the motives of the paintings. They are like binding images, interstices between events essential to the narrative. The motives are disconnected from their contexts and exhausted of meaning. In the exhibition setting various ”empty” works come into contact, regaining meaning in the proximity of each other.

The works adapt ways of depicting and perceiving reality deriving from different eras. Stretching from illusionistic figurativeness to the abstract modern idiom, painting falls into an equal relationship with our media-defined manner of perception shaped by images.

Tarja Pitkänen-Walter