PAUL OSIPOWPaintings 24.5.2014 – 19.6.2014
This exhibition by Finnish artist Paul Osipow continues his examination in recent years of classic themes depicting ancient architecture. He has explored the temple ruins at Didyma and Hierapolis in Turkey and at Olympia in Greece. Osipow´s photographs of the walls, columns, decorative motifs, passages and courtyards of the temple ruins form the source material from which he outlines motifs and makes sketches. The final artworks more or less resemble their geneses: they are modified and revised, amplified and reduced.
When creating his works, Osipow above all turns to the power of visuality, its language and the impressions it creates. It is as if he replaces direct references from reality with his own indirect quotations, thereby trusting in the images of truth he himself has created rather than in the photographic truth, existing history and stories. The birth of a painting: its forms, colours and brush strokes - thoughts, emotions and deeds - has a history of its own. And it is this history that seems to create the story behind Osipow´s paintings.
Osipow also avoids giving names to his works that would appeal to thoughts and feelings and thus charge them with external influences. His paintings are quite simply Buildings, Passages or Courtyards. It is up to the viewer to fill in the course of events in Osipow´s paintings of sites, stories and history inspired by the ancient world. His paintings are charged also with the balanced co-existence of painstaking, yet at times also undisciplined, shapes and the seamless convergence of vibrant colours originating in the hands of the artist. Viewers can enjoy the sophisticated charm of the whole.
Rauli Heino