”Looking with the poet at the picture of the mountain”

17 nov – 19 dec. Opening sat 17 nov 12-16.

Vesa-Pekka Rannikko is a 2007 nominee for the Carnegie Art Award for Nordic painting, the 2006 Stina Krooks Stiftelse Award, Fine Art Association of Finland Ducat Prize (2003) as well as many other awards and government grants. His work can be found in public and private collections such as Kiasma, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki City Art Museum, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Arabia Museum and The Fine Arts Association of Finland in Helsinki.

A core problem of my work has been the issue of how to create a piece, a work of sculpture, that could also be experienced and conceived as a picture. I prepare figurative sculptures from colored plaster and acrylic paste so that the piece itself already gains the feeling of light. These works create a paradox in which the sculpture itself as a three-dimensional object is at the same time in space and light, representing some other situation signified by the light and shadow worked into it. The work is then simultaneously present in the past and present; the sculpture is at once the observer and object which is observed

Through the choice of themes of my works, I also seek to create a dialogue between the figurativeness of the theme and the manner of representation of the work itself.. Essential for content is the chain of meanings that arises between the initial two-dimensional picture and the final sculpture, which can also be interpreted as an image.

My exhibitions are often composed of works of highly different themes. In an exhibition as a whole, I aim at constructing networks of meaning with which the works are connected to each other. There is often a single work in each showing that assembles the theme.

”Looking with the poet at the picture of the mountain”

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) has written a poem called “Lapiz lazuli” (1939). In that poem Yeats draws a parallel between the time before the Second World War in Western world and Chinese ancient civilization. In the poem he depicts a chinese miniature sculpture which he has gotten for his 70th birthday. Sculpture is carved picture of landscape or mountain as a landscape. Trees, buldnings and people are as a relief on the surface of stone. There is a sense of distance and lancapeness in the sculpture. Yeats’ sculpture is made of Lapiz Lazuli stone which is also a original raw material of ultramarine blue pigment.

In the exhibition in galleri Thomas Wallner there is a three dimensional work which has had its starting point in a photography of Yeats*s sculpture. Yeats in his poem changes the medium of expression from sculptural object to written text. That is parallel to a process of transforming a photo to a three dimensonal form. The same picture is looked together but completely in different situation.