KRISTIINA UUSITALOThis Is Not Snow 2.4.2016 – 24.4.2016

This is not snow

When I turn my gaze towards what, for the moment, remains strange, frightening and even revolting, it slowly changes into something I can comprehend; through compassion it gains a new guise. I paint from the borderline between otherness and connection. To introduce my works, I would like to turn to Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1925-1977), whose novel The Passion According to G.H. describes an unexpected path towards a love for all living things, even cockroaches - the insight that we are all made up of other people. This is the most radical shift in thinking possible. The whole of the world is me.

"The narrow route passed through the difficult cockroach, and I'd squeezed with disgust through that body of scales and mud. And I'd ended up, I too completely filthy, emerging through the cockroach into my past that was my continuous present and my continuous future - and that today and always is on the wall, and my fifteen million daughters, from then up to myself, were there too. My life was as continuous as death. Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages, and we call one of them death. I had always been in life, and it matters little that it wasn't I properly speaking, not what I'd usually call I. I was always in life."

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (English translation by Idra Novey, 2012)

When I address matters important to me through painting, it is like I´m painting Magritte´s pipe. This is not snow. When selecting the elements that appear in my works, I have through of the collision of the animate and the inanimate, the sensible-sensing corporeality and the ever-changing ground beneath us.

Kristiina Uusitalo