Sami Lukkarinen 4.12.-21.12. 2003
Church colors
The oil paintings of modern Finnish church architecture in this exhibition were completed in 2002-2003 and mostly feature suburban churches built in Finland between the 1950s and 1980s. What makes them interesting is their design and setting and I consider them to be outstanding examples of suburban architecture. I found photographs of the churches in my paintings on parish websites. The church architecture series is a continuation of my 4-year project of studying the relationship between digital images and the art of painting. Project topics included graffiti covered trains, international functionalist architecture and child growth from the aspect of information growth. I am convinced that the digital image and digitalisation will bring about new technical and content potential to the art of painting.
The principal tool using during my painting process was Photoshop Software, which I used to pick and manipulate the photograph to be painted. Photoshop also reduces the amount of picture information, so that the pixels are brought out more clearly. The pixels are enlarged and the computer logic calculates colour values and light. I vary the resolutions to create several versions of an image and base my painting on the best. The final image contains 800-2000 pixels and hundreds of different shades. When painting, I try to reproduce the pixel colours as faithfully as possible on canvas, but without retouching them later. Errors and imperfections introduce an important analogical element into my work. It is not only the different colour systems of the digital image and oil painting that meet in my work, but also their intangibility and materiality. Each painting is an attempt to discover a balance between modern architecture, digital image and oil painting.
Sami Lukkarinen
Translation: Käännös-Aazet Oy
And still there is painting to be done
Painting differs from other modes of imaging, among other things, in the
way that a painting, apart from its subject matter of motif, also concretely
shows the working process that led to the finished work. Painting documents
the dialogue between the artist and the work, that journey whose destination
is frequently the resolution of the problem chosen as its point of departure.
The working process is more or less a detailed account of how that journey
went.
The problem that Sami Lukkarinen has set himself is how to take the digitally
produced sketch that provides the starting point for his work and realise
it in an independent, autonomous painting. A typical Lukkarinen work consists
of hundreds of coloured squares, each of which is individual and painted
with a broad brush. The visual tension in the work partly arises out of
the opposition between the grid pattern that is the backbone of the composition
and the colour fields that apparently find themselves in disarray. One of
the questions posed by Lukkarinen’s painting is: Why these specific
colours? Why this specific order?
Lukkarinen uses architecture photographs as a point of departure for his
paintings. When selecting images he nevertheless keeps his hands of the
classics of architecture or official portraits of buildings. For him, these
are too finished; either they are laden with meanings or then they interpret
the buildings. He has picked the photographs of Finnish churches that he
uses in his latest paintings series from parish websites. He is fascinated
both by the ‘local university’ of the form language of modernist
suburban architecture and by the neutral anonymity of the photographs that
portray it.
Having found a photograph that will potentially work as a painting, Lukkarinen
digitises it and manipulates it by enlarging the pixels to such a size that
they enter into a natural, uncomplicated relationship, on the one hand,
with their motif and, on the other hand, with the painting as a whole. Each
square gets its colour and light value as averages calculated on a computer.
Lukkarinen’s paintings, frequently made up of fields of broken colour,
represent a kind of reverse pointillism, in which rather than being broken
down into their constituent parts, the colours are mixed together. The painting
emerges as he copies his digital photograph a bit at a time onto canvas.
Even though he performs his task as well as he can, his objective is, nevertheless,
not a hand-made enlargement of the digital sketch, but a work in which the
starting point and end result are present in equal measure. This is a painting,
a picture of a picture, but it is also an autonomous object, an icon that
has come about as the outcome of a multi-stage working process.
Lukkarinen’s relationship with the modernist architecture that is
the starting point for his paintings seems complicated, simultaneously desiring
and rejecting, admiring and mocking. The gridded colour fields can easily
be seen as having a close affinity with the genre of constructivist paintings,
which were being made in the mid-20th century, at the same time as these
light, rectangular buildings were being completed. Lukkarinen’s works
follow their original models, if they have one, but in figurative form,
and devoid of the social utopias that were their hallmark, or at most longing
for them. They are signs that allude to a lost future and a lost innocence.
The idealisation of digital images in turn brings our thoughs back to the
present moment. We mostly see this relatively new method of image manipulation
when something being published in the media is to be protected or censored.
The most common examples are associated with hard porn and with the accused
in criminal cases. In some cases modern architecture, too, has been the
one in the dock, albeit without the protective rectangle.
A multiplicity of interpretations is a part of Lukkarinen’s art and
lifts his works above their individual themes or, for example, above being
no more than their relationship with modernism. In fact, specifically the
way that his works permit simultaneous and even totally contradictory interpretations
speaks of their strengths and ways of surviving in the complicated reality
of our age, in which one truth is soon rapidly replaced by another, with
both quickly losing their news value.
And yet, just like the architect who has designed his building, Lukkarinen
has to paint each work to the point of completion, so as to at least see
what it will be like and how it will work. The coloured squares that are
the building blocks of the paintings are comparable to the modularity of
the buildings that have provided their starting point. The architecture
of the image mirrors the image of the architecture, in being conscious of
this world.
Timo Valjakka
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Church
of Järvenpää
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Church
of Malmi
|
|
Church
of Pirkkala
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Church
of Pieksämäki
|
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Parish
house of Nokia
Enlarge by clicking the image. Press images are available at the gallery. |
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