Ville Löppönen
Ghosts

03. - 26.10.2014

Ville Löppönen’s Ghosts is his third solo exhibition at the gallery. It creates and makes a direct, ever more compact and condensed continuation of Löppönen’s previous paintings and exhibitions: paintings that travel and traverse through an emphatically representational figure and situation towards the mysteries of existence, and to not always so minor grimnesses and grimaces. It is seeking things out, it is living with a great conundrum.

Ghosts situates itself in an alternation between icon and landscape. And somewhere between them the painting is activated as something that draws both on the personal and on details (an icon) and a painting, which constitutes an emerging whole in line with something universal yet particular (a landscape). As a result the painting as an enticing, challenging vehicle that carries us towards dark forces, towards marks scratched by spectres, and yet, despite all the setbacks, always advancing towards the light, towards the light. A painting that combines the past and the future, the visible and the unattainable.

“The language of my paintings comes out of the traditions of Eastern icon art and Western church art, and also out of the imagery and visual narrative of both contemporary painting and the contemporary field of comics. My imagery deals with the healing character of suffering, the human being’s fight and struggle within the self and its contradictions. I think of my art as being theological contemporary art, as a space in the painting process for contemplative prayer, painting as a part of spirituality.”

This is a matter of movement, of a simultaneous multi-level process, in which the painting is made actual as a handicraft skill, as a continual, practical seeking out of content and meaningfulness, and as a spiritual, religious journey. The icon is found in the landscape and, correspondingly, landscape-likeness is found in the core of the icon. Alternately sparring, seeking companionship beside your opposite, and finding it.

It is a journey, during which the subtleties of the light and the various features of the darkness are situated, swap places and lose their way, fooling the viewer. It is a seeking out of contact, finding your way to your potential in a manner that offers the painting as a means for being present, with all its contradictions, its ice-melts, and its possibilities for beauty, for being human.

“The painting is the language and the site of my prayers. The picture speaks soundless words in the painting. In ascesis the painting is charged into being a prayer, into being a place to meet God. Prayer and ascesis go together inseparably, since you have to become silent in order to pray.”

“The asceticism in prayer that takes place in the painting process is a revealing prayer. This is characterized by revelation. The painting is able to bring out issues and questions that I do not otherwise see or hear. For me, prayer without painting is more momentary and more blind, more restless. My verbal prayer is unable to get to where I am taken in the process of painting. Verbality stays on the level of my own understanding.”

“I could imagine that in a painting silence is more possible for me than in merely verbal prayer. Painting becomes a means. It allows ascesis. Painting offers a possibility for collectedness, for becoming silent. Self-collection and silence lead to listening, and to the sensitivity of intuitive action, and ultimately to seeing. The act of painting is susceptible to seeing, which comes in the form of showing, not self-chosen looking.”

Quotations from Ville Löppönen’s manuscript “The painter between the icon and the landscape”.

Ville Löppönen (b. 1980 in Savonlinna, Finland) graduated from the Department of Painting in the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007 and held his debut show at Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary in 2008. He has participated in group exhibitions in Finland and abroad, in Europe as well as in North America. His solo exhibitions have been shown, apart from Gallery Kalhama and Piippo Contemporary, e.g. in The Bonnafant Gallery in San Fransisco in 2013. Löppönen's works are represented in several Finnish art collections like the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Turku Art Museum and Oulu Art Museum.