Timo Valjakka interview — MARI RANTANEN

A conversation between Mari Rantanen and Timo Valjakka

Timo Valjakka: Looking at your latest paintings in the Stockholm exhibition last October, I started thinking about a particular feature that, in addition to strong colours, seems to permeate your work, all the way from the 1980s to the present: without exception, they have very clear structure. Moreover, sometimes that structure seems to be completely systematic. I suppose your works are based on some preconceived system?

Mari Rantanen: I can’t paint without a plan: Each work of mine is based on a distinct idea, which you could take as structure and based on which I paint my paintings. It could be the idea of what a strawberry tastes like or of a shape or colour in relation to rhythm or space. It is the idea of the content of the painting. Even a tiny idea can be the birth of a large painting or an entire series of paintings.
I’ve always been interested in different systems and the systems humans create for themselves. I’m interested in the relationship between order and chaos; I want to put chaos into order and to destroy order. Also, I’ve always felt connected to abstract art, that’s something I learned at home.

TV: How far do you go thinking about the structure of a painting before you start working on it? Do you make detailed sketches or calculations?

MR: I really don’t make sketches a lot. I’ve got pieces of paper I use to try out the number of parts and their relationships, study rhythms and spaces, the kind of surfaces I’ll paint and the kind of light I want. But the painting process itself is very open and my paintings can change a lot during the process – three parts can become five and green can turn into red. You could compare my plan to making a problem statement, while the painting process is an attempt to resolve the problem.

TV: You can’t create a systems out of nothing…

MR: They can’t be improvised. When I have a system, I can look for counter systems and then resolve their mutual relationship as I paint. Resolving paintings also gives rise to various alternatives, which in turn lead to new paintings. The point of departure is important but what is equally important is that there are things in my paintings which I’ve discovered entirely by chance as I worked on the paintings. That makes painting an adventure.
And of course painting must provide pleasure to the painter. It has to be interesting, challenging and even difficult. The completed work, on the other hand, must satisfy both my intellectual and emotional needs.

TV: Soon after you graduated, you went to New York to continue your studies…

MR: Initially I planned to spend a year in New York because I was interested in American contemporary art. I wanted see what art really looks like over there, I wanted to see more than just pictures in art magazines. I’ve always travelled a lot because I’ve wanted to see artworks with my own eyes, on the spot.
I realised later that what I was also doing was distancing myself from the 1970s working class realism and the mostly European tradition of geometric abstraction, which dominated in Finland. Besides, in the late 1970s, there was a lot less international contemporary art available in Finland than there is today.

TV: And when you returned, you brought with you a completely new type of paintings, large non-stretched canvases covered from edge to edge with intense colours and ornamental, almost kinetic patterns.

MR: I was fascinated with abstract imagery, from Claude Viallat’s works to textile patterns. I’ve also travelled in Mexico where I saw wonderful Indian textiles. Their fancy decorativeness completely charmed me.
When I was at school, decorativeness was a negative thing, it was a dirty word. In fact, for some people even Henri Matisse was decorative, which meant shallow! In contrast, decorativeness was a positive thing in America. For me, ornaments and repeating patterns are ways to express a wide range of emotions. Decorativeness is a form of expression.
Around that time, I was also beginning to look critically at the unbelievably masculine narrative that the history of abstract painting largely is. Many of the artists I admired were men: Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Ellworth Kelly. In America, I found alternatives to them: classics such as Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, and younger artists such as Elisabeth Murray and Valerie Jaudon.

TV: … all of whom were developing a different type of abstract imagery and did it entirely on their own premisses. For example, Pattern Painting of the early 1980s, which your paintings are clearly examples of, was a conscious opening of a female perspective on abstract expression.

MR: That’s correct. Just the fact that these women went and did ‘their own thing’ was terribly important for me. It was only in New York that I realised how badly I wanted to fight for the views of my generation and to show what women were doing – partly because it was my own history, partly because I feel it is important to bring out different perspectives.

TV: Feminism was a rather late arrival in the works of Finnish women…

MR: In the late 1970s feminism – or any new art theory – was not really discussed much in Finland. In New York, however, I met women artists who integrated the visuality of abstract art and women's culture.

TV: Your first trip to New York took place at a time that was interesting in other ways, too. The new post-modern painting had made its breakthrough and the related theoretical debate was underway.

MR: At first New York was like an immense sweet shop for me, it had everything all at once. There were Italian transavantgardists and German neo-expressionism but also Sean Scully and David Reed, for example, who really changed abstract art. Things were happening all the time, everywhere. It wasn’t just one or two things at a time like in Finland, where national and international, realistic and abstract expression were wrestling one another.
When I returned to New York in 1986, I started to understand the entire post-modern debate a lot better. It was then that I really grasped feminism and the idea of the language of painting and painting as language. I also realised that I am a romantic and that I believe in originality and a utopia of sorts. To a degree, at least. So I'm not a pure postmodernist, after all.
I also decided that I don’t want to prune my paintings and remove things but to add more of them. I wanted to make new paintings, not the last ones like many who were exited with Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square. I wanted to create a rich language of painting in which I could associate things in an unorthodox way and let my own hand show.

TV: What was New York like in the mid-1980s? Could you describe the climate a little, it must’ve influenced your paintings?

MR: New York was East Village, graffiti and kitsch. It was crazy energy and for me, it meant a release from rules and orthodoxy. It also meant that I learned to understand myself better and what I wanted to do. You can have all kinds of references but they have to mean something. As an artists I have to be logical in my plans and changes, in my relationship with painting, despite always striving to be open.
I lived at a corner in Chinatown, at the edge of Little Italy, in the midst of visual and cultural abundance. I loved Canal Street and followed Ross Bleckner painting chandeliers and stripes at the same time. I realised that I could do anything, which was a wild insight for me and very liberating.
I had earlier seen works by classic painters, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock but now, I became familiar with artists who were making an entirely new kind of abstract art, including Jonathan Lasker and Jessica Stockholder and the Europeans Gerhard Richter and Howard Hodgkin. Sigmar Polke's open attitude has also meant a lot to me.
What’s more, I realised that abstractness as such was not all that important. I wanted and I still want to make paintings that tell a story, that have a narrative. My art talks about humanity and I want to make a stand, even a political one, and a difference, too. My works are not just decoration.

TV: You’ve said that for you, museums are more about enjoying art than consciously drawing inspiration or getting influences.

MR: That’s right, at certain times at least. I’ve always been interested in art history but my works engage in dialogue with contemporary art, more than anything else. They also comment on what others have painted. They often have small messages, like love letters to artists whose works have influenced me.
On the other hand, I might just as well borrow ‘that specific pink’ from a shopping bag than from El Greco or some contemporary painter. I've intentionally wanted to include some ‘kitchen culture’ in my paintings, ingredients from influences of daily life. This is because I find it important that my paintings refer to different areas of life, not just fine arts and other culture.

TV: Everything is OK as long as it suits the purpose, as Reijo Hukkanen likes to say.

MR: Everything is OK as long as it suits the purpose, but we’re all responsible for the choices we make. There are a lot of things I’ve wanted to paint and elements I’ve wanted to use but I’ve never managed to fit them together very well. Not everything I'm interested in simply works for my paintings, not yet at least.

TV: Talking about plastic bags and kitchens, I seem to recall that you’ve always looked for influences outside the context of Western art, from your trips to Mexico, Thailand and India, for example. You made the series of paintings entitled Unbearable Lightness of Being based on your trip to India a few years ago and it attracted considerable attention. It was shown at Millesgården in Stockholm in 2004 and later in Tornio and Kuopio in Finland.

MR: I’d been in Chiang Mui in Thailand with my colleague Annette Senneby, setting up an exhibition. I must’ve lived in Thailand in a previous life because its colours, architecture and decorativeness mean so much to me and make me feel completely at home.
On our return flight, as we were crossing over India, I told Annette that we have to visit it someday. Later, when I was planning my trip, I was told that I absolutely have to see Taj Mahal at sunset. What a cliché, I thought to myself, but decided to do it, why not.
We went to India in spring 2004 and travelled by bus across very poor countryside. And then all of a sudden, there it was, a white feminine lace temple, rising against the sky. It was magnificent and mind-blowing. It's a great architectural masterpiece that really brings you to your knees!
As the sun set behind the temple, it was as if the building quivered in the air, levitating lightly. It was like an apparition that disappeared for a moment and returned again. It was a totally existential experience. I just stood there and gazed at the temple as it flickered and quivered and went away and came back. It was there and then it wasn’t.
The exhibition at Millesgården was approaching. The gallery had a 30-metre-long wall that I had thought about a lot. I had done underground maps and floor plans of shopping centres for many years and I felt that I had exhausted the motif. And then came the façade of this temple that involved architecture, man-made landscape and the variation of light.
I had painted a lot of sunsets right after I had finished my studies, it was a means of moving on from figurative to abstract expression. I admire Rothko and I've always considered him a painter of sunsets.
Because of my relationship with postmodernism and the fact that I'm no Claude Monet, I obviously made out each façade differently, chequered and striped, and also manipulated the paints in various ways. But most of all I wanted to paint the psychological and physical experience that comes about when something is there and isn't at the same time. This is the actual subject of the Millesgården paintings, this and the experience of light.

TV: Architecture is very strongly present in these paintings, and it is closely associated with structure, which we discussed earlier.

MR: If you think about my paintings over the past five years, it’s architecture more than anything else that has become a very important source of inspiration for me. The same applies to the visuality that is associated with architecture. I've intentionally travelled to countries with a strong visual culture and rich architecture, such as Thailand and India. I had searched for a specific palette, form and decorativeness.
I’m interested in making art from culture, from things that people have made. It’s a big subject for me, covering popular culture, world cultures and various subcultures – and of course piles of spices and all the junk in the streets. I’m also interested in the energy a place generates.
This is what the underground maps – icons of urban navigation – deal with. This series is based on the maps of cities I’ve lived in or visited. They are portraits of cities, images of what the cities feel like to me. They have obvious figurative elements, which also makes them interesting paintings. I actually painted them from models, from real maps.
The underground maps and later the floor plans of shopping centres, on which the series Shop Till You Drop I–III is based, for example, were important subjects to me because they dealt with public space and places we share with each other. At the same time I also made paintings that were based on private spaces. For instance, My Little Sunshine and Liquid Assets were inspired by drawings I had made of my daughter's room.

TV: Let's talk about architecture some more and the vertical and horizontal lines and frontality that are integral to it. They also appear in your paintings, which in most cases are intended to be viewed from the front, just like Taj Mahal and other such temples.

MR: I've been influenced more by old European churches, rose windows, their structural symmetry and severely frontal facades. On the other hand, my influences include Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie, for example. To me, Taj Mahal is more about that experience of light.

TV: In many of your paintings there is an obvious gravitation towards symmetry. On the other hand, your paintings are just as likely to have a ruptured symmetry, what with the individual panels. How did this shredded structure come about?

MR: It started with my first diptych, which was Wedding from 1989. It all started because I had accumulated so much stuff in the painting that I couldn’t fit it into a single panel anymore. I wanted to find contrasting pairs and that required more space. A diptych, a two-part painting, made sense to me.
It’s also about structuring the painting. In one panel, the colour may flow and the painting is expressive, while the other is structural and geometric. What matters is how well you combine the languages of the painting and juxtapose them. The panels allow things to collide into each other like cars in a crash, and you don't have to worry about the edges when you paint, either.
Again, this reveals my interest in chaos and order and my desire to say many things at once. What I think it reflects is our pluralist culture, that there’s no one truth anymore. Instead, there are many parallel and layered truths.

TV: The division into panels also makes your paintings urban, big city paintings, if you like. I think the horizontal division is like a landscape whereas the vertical divisions of your paintings remind me of architecture and the experience of urban space, maybe even Times Square in New York, with the tall buildings slicing the view into thin vertical strips.

MR: I’m sure New York’s cityscape has had an impact on me. Another influence is films. I'm interested in the structure of film, they way films are edited and their linear movement. When two-part paintings started to feel too authoritative and their dialogical structure too rigid, I started making multi-part paintings with three, four or even five parts.
The purpose of the division into panels was to break down the hierarchy of the painting, I didn’t want to allow it to dictate the direction of movement. Also, the division contained the metaphorical suggestion that life consists of parts and to see the full picture you need to piece them together. Different combinations produce different experiences which are mutually equal. I want to offer visual experiences more in the spirit of Baroque than Minimalism.
The panel structure also provides flexibility and an opportunity to compare various systems, and that way it also comments on the structures of modern society. I think of my paintings as visual models of a sort of the world we live in and I try to point out different visual systems and their correlations. I want to search and pose questions instead of declaring truths. You can interpret my paintings any way you like, as playful and/or serious.

TV: Whenever I’ve seen a new exhibition by you, you’ve added a new element to your work and that element has always been the hallmark of the particular show. What is your work process like in the long term? What happens in the time between exhibitions?

MR: I’ve always worked in serially, it is very important to me. I have a number of elements at my disposal and I try to find out what I can make of them, how to shuffle the pack.
However, I don’t want to repeat myself, I want to search for something new. The paintings based on underground maps are a good example. After having made nine of them, I felt that I had nothing more to add. The same happens with shapes and colours. If I know how a painting will turn out in advance, it won’t be interesting to paint it. I want to intentionally change things and keep myself interested, but sometimes things just happen, which change my life and help me make new paintings. This happened once when I was watching my daughter doing a puzzle. It came to me that the structure of a puzzle is an alternative to the traditional modernist grid.
Changes of place also show in my work. After living in New York for ten years, my longing for Europe won me over. When I was given the professorship in painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, my whole family moved with me to the city. It's now been ten rewarding years, and what's more, my students were a great inspiration.

TV: The new paintings of yours shown in Stockholm are based on the Fibonacci numbers. Does that mean that you've returned from the United States to Europe via Asia and ended up with an old Italian mathematician?

MR: I’m very much seeped in Western art history and I do see Asia through very European eyes. In fact, my new paintings have to do with a recent visit to Pompeii and an installation-like series of paintings by Andy Warhol that I saw a while ago. Of course, Italy has always had a strong presence in my art and the same goes for mathematics.
Standing on ancient mosaics in Pompeii and looking at the walls and ceiling, all of which were painted, I realised that this is how art should be. That there are paintings on the walls and paintings in the ceiling and mosaics in the floor and that I'm inside that art so that art is part of my life and it also tells about my life.
This inspired the idea to make an installation, consisting of many paintings, in which all parts would be associated with each other. The Fibonacci series became the thing that linked them together: the number of panels increases from one to three, five, eight, concluding with the floor painting that has 34 parts. The idea of a 21-part and 10-metre-long artwork was sufficiently crazy, fascinating and challenging. I simply had to do it. It’s title is Taking the Line for a Walk according to a painting by Paul Klee. I designed it for a gallery because the space in itself is reminiscent of the courtyard atriums in Pompeii.

TV: The piece also has several elements, perhaps for the first time, which repeat shapes, colours and structures you've used at different times.

MR: When you’ve painted as long as I have, almost thirty years now, you inadvertently start to refer back to yourself, your own past and your own old paintings. Of course, even before elements disappeared from my works only to return later.

TV: Can a painting be designed in advance or does each painting make itself in the end?

MR: Partly, yes. The framework can be laid out in advance. For example, in this particular case I had decided the size of my paintings in advance based in the dimensions of the gallery. But then I had to paint each one of them by way of trial and mistake, trying out which pink and which green suited them. When I paint I look for a certain experience of light and also a certain precision, that the painting comes to life and has the emotion I am looking for.
I want to touch people’s emotions and influence their thoughts. I try to inspire emotions and feelings. I want to make life and something of what we don’t see visible, too.

TV: Does it take long to finish a painting? When is a painting finished?

MR: Painting is a process. When I begin a new series, it takes time before I manage to produce anything decent. When I pick up the threads of it, I can work pretty fast, though. The works you saw in Stockholm took about ten months to paint and the eight large paintings at Millesgården took roughly the same time.
I work long hours and my hands are always smeared in paint. I have a feeling, though, that I’m a relatively productive artist. I do spend a lot of time on fixing and improving, painting over and changing things. I do have a hard time deciding when a painting is finished.

TV: The amount of work you do does show in the end result. With all the fixes and changes, the paint is layered thick like an elephant's skin.

MR: For a long time I considered it important that the fixes show because I liked it when paintings have a history. It's like an archaeology of material. I used to have numerous ways to handle material, it was a big part of the imagery of my paintings. In fact, this still shows in the Millesgården paintings, which have dozens of layers.
I feel that the way one paints is just as important as what one paints. I did my new paintings relatively cleanly. Because I wanted them to appear light and fresh, I didn’t do any fixing and instead, when something went wrong I simply started a new canvas. When you’ve plastered paint on the canvas long enough you want to paint with a light hand.
On the other hand, what I want to say has become clearer to me. I make fewer mistakes and I'm also more accepting. I have greater trust in myself and I no longer have to do things by force. I've broken free of many of the rules that used to constrain me and may once have been important. What I want to say and how I want to say it changes with time.
Nowadays, Europe also seems more real to me than America. Europe has history. I'm also fascinated by Asia, by cultures that show the hand of people and how people have made life visible. Since I want to make life visible, I’ve always wanted to see places where this has been done for a long time. New York continues to be my favourite city but the same goes for Venice, Rome and London.

TV: And just now, after eleven years in Stockholm, you’re in the process of creating a large exhibition for Kunsthalle Helsinki.

MR: ...and large, new paintings. I still paint but the relationship with space and architecture is more pronounced than before. I want to make paintings that interact with space, installations, even. What interests me know is the idea I encountered in the Buddhist temples of Thailand and the atriums of Pompeii that you can live inside a painting or a work of art. What I now want to make is spaces and places for emotions.

Timo Valjakka

Published in ”Mari Rantanen Maalauksia/Paintings 1986-2007” by Like 2007
Translation by Erik Miller