RISTO SUOMIMoonlit nights 20.4.2024 – 12.5.2024

Visual artist Risto Suomi (b. 1951) is one of Finland’s best-known and best-liked contemporary artists of his generation. His breakthrough came in the early 1980s. Suomi's imagery and subject world are recognisable with its echoes of not only images of childhood fairy tales and folk tales, but also of the art of great surrealists in world art such as Magritte.

In his Moonlit Nights exhibition, Risto Suomi's works seem to be the artist's personal journeys through time and space, through the moonlit night sky. For him, making art is primarily about perceiving his own identity. At the same time, however, his view of the world is universal.

Metaphorically, the moon represents change. The lunar cycle and its different phases structure time and tell about the passage of time. It also reflects the sun and thus figuratively like an invisible reality. The full moon can also be seen as a halo indicating holiness, a state of illumination, a higher consciousness, heavenly glory, or overcoming death.

Risto Suomi's surrealist tone depicts ordinary things, people and objects combined in strangely surprising ways. InThe moon-bearer, a man gently holds the moon like a crystal ball. In The last night flight, a man travels by plane towards the moon. In the four corners of the blue starry sky, the tearful eye, Camberwell Beauty, listening ear and the question mark indicate the purpose and destination of the journey. In The wooden horse, the Trojan horse from Greek mythology stands in the glow of the moon, and in The road to Shangri-La, a man rides a horse along a lunar bridge. In The night painter, the artist wears a blindfold over his eyes in a night landscape illuminated by the moon. Even if he removed the blindfold, he wouldn't see it better.

Risto Suomi says that he painted the works in the exhibition out of great concern about the current world situation. The underlying mental undertone is indicated by the pitch-black backgrounds of several works. In addition to the works in the exhibition, he has also painted a picture of Vladimir Putin wearing a red cloak, the patterns of which consist of globes and different continents of the globe. Wearing it, Putin plays a concertina, setting the pace for his attempt to conquer the world. However, like Pinocchio, his nose has grown long.

Rauli Heino