Janne Räisänen
Käy peremmälle. Ota vaatteet pois.

08. - 31.01.2016

“Originally there was no connection between the painting itself and the title. Then, one sunny autumn day, Justin Bieber visited Berlin. That was a couple of months ago. I realized that Bieber was right next door, skateboarding in the Park am Gleisdreieck. A photographer had taken a picture. The idea began to bother me so much that I thought of adding something to Elämäni ohikiitävä rakkaus painting series.”

 

Janne Räisänen draws and paints life’s little-big stories on canvas and paper. The stories are heart-warming, humorous, and sometimes even peculiar reflections of everyday life. Räisänen has harnessed drawing into being an almost daily routine, which he uses to get a grip on his working process, managing to create in his paintings the same immediate atmosphere as in his drawings. For him this is a way of avoiding being forced to do anything on canvas.

 

Elämäni ohikiitävä rakkaus: Justin Bieber skeittaa Gleisdreieckin puistossa was intended to be part of quite a different series of paintings, but as the process dragged on, frustration prompted Räisänen to slash the canvas and to paint more and more new layers on it. Finally, he added a figure that he later called Justin Bieber.

 

“A lot of the works start with my priming a canvas, I mix things together, I draw and apply colours, and then it takes a while before I myself know what I am doing.”

 

Räisänen works via experiment, chance, successes and failures – always without taking what he does too seriously. This is also evident in the titles of his works. These are given with a glint in the eye and set the viewer’s imagination and train of associations in motion. The title of the exhibition is a quotation from the album Ota vaatteet pois (take off your clothes) by Finnish artist Kikka and occurred to him in a park in the company of a friend, prompting roars of laughter.

 

Janne Räisänen lives and works in Berlin. Käy peremmälle. Ota vaatteet pois. is his first exhibition at Helsinki Contemporary, and brings a solo exhibition by Räisänen to Helsinki after a long hiatus.

 

Janne Räisänen (b. 1971 in Pudasjärvi) graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1998. He was awarded the Finnish Art Society's Ducat Prize in 1999, the same year as he was named Young Artist of the Year together with Janne Kaitala and Jukka Korkeila. In 1999 and 2001, he was a candidate for the Carnegie Art Award and, in 2004, for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Räisänen’s works are in several Finnish public collections and numerous foreign ones. In 2015, his works were shown widely in Germany, including at Schwarz Contemporary and Salon Dahlmann in Berlin, and at the Kunstverein Schwäbisch Hall’s Galerie am Markt. His last solo exhibition in Finland was at Galerie Anhava in 2012.