In conversation with Jukka Rusanen

Artist Jukka Rusanen discusses his art with historian & curator Ritva Röminger-Czako. Read the discussion in Finnish.

Ritva: The name of your solo exhibition at the Helsinki Contemporary Gallery in March 2020 was “Sketch”. The name came as a surprise, as sketching in art depicts a more-or-less precise outline of an artistic idea, which often serves as a basis for later work. Sketches are usually the artist’s private, intimate area. They can also be displayed, but usually alongside the final work to reveal more about the artist’s hand and the course of their creative process. So why choose this name for the exhibition?

Jukka: The name was related to the idea that I did not want to claim or declare anything final in my works, but rather offer a proposal. I consciously wanted to leave things open. I think the artistic process is always continuous, and all the works and exhibitions are sketches of the world. I also wanted to distance myself from the artist’s position as a “master”, and say: here are my works, this is my way of seeing and portraying things, but this is just one possibility, and it’s not a statement. It’s important to me to focus on the work rather than the author, as often happens today. Apart from that, I felt that there were so many threads running through the materials and subject matter in my work that I didn’t want to underline meanings too much.

Ritva: There are a lot of sketch-like elements in the works that you made last year. They are also considerably quieter than the previous ones, which were very expressive and used intense, thick colours. The compositions are now more sparse, and the use of brush and colour is on the whole lighter and thinner. Traces of something come to mind, and sometimes it looks like you’ve wiped some of the traces away. Some works, on the other hand, appear almost transparent, and the surfaces of some are covered as if by a translucent imaginary curtain that mutes the colours. What has inspired this change?

Jukka: I’ve long held a desire to quieten things down, and it seems like the silence has also moved into my paintings. I listened to my inner voice and wanted to move forward in my work in a way that felt natural at the time.

Colours have a strong psychological effect on me. I simply couldn’t use intense, hard colours, even though I’d used them so much before. For one work, for example, I was forced to remove a small bright red element, even though before that I painted whole brightly-coloured surfaces as backgrounds. I also felt some kind of need to wash and clean my paintings, so I rubbed their surfaces. This was all related to the fact that I was experiencing a severe crisis in my life and it naturally bled into my work as well. It was hard for me to express my feelings, and in the painting this was reflected in the way that leaving a trace of myself felt contradictory and even harrowing.

Ritva: An intense use of colour and rich shapes have made a comeback in your new works.

Jukka: After my exhibition last spring, I took a short break from painting, but because of the pandemic I went back to work even before the summer. When I started working, I felt like I had to tear myself out of the past exhibition and burst its bubble and move on, but gradually I began to feel the need for real splashes of colour, and I found a situation and a painting rhythm where the painting kind of painted itself. This was also an effort to get rid of too much thinking and analysis, and find an intuitive way of painting.

Ritva: That brings to mind Willy Baumeister, the great master of German post-World War II informalism, who wrote the art theory book “The Unknown in Art”. According to Baumeister, the artist cannot control their painting process because art has its own internal forces, and the artist is ultimately just a mediator of these. Do you agree? Could you give a little description of the nature of your own work and how long the painting process takes?

Jukka: There is indeed a side to art that reaches out towards something primitive that exists beyond logical thought. Without it, things will only become images, or objects whose denominators can be deconstructed into words. This is artistic work’s biggest challenge and reward, all wrapped up in the same package. I understand a great many suffering artists who have consciously strived to reach this place without words, and have both succeeded and been destroyed. However, life is made up of several different aspects, and the artist should be in balance between them to allow the world to open up this intuitive side of things. I feel like I’m just learning this balance and getting to know my own unconscious. I have found that my works are often created impulsively, but in many cases it has taken years of thought for the work to find the right form to emerge.

Ritva: You said that one work gives birth to another, suggesting that your work emerges as a series. Is this so?

Jukka: Yes, I do work serially. My way of working has always been such that I travel from many directions towards a single point. During the work process, the works gradually become intertwined and some kind of all-encompassing narrative emerges. Even if it’s the whole show, I see it as a single work. It’s interesting what kind of connections individual works create in relation to each other. In my “Sketch” exhibition, there was a large hand-woven linen cloth, which fell into conversation with a portrait of Virginia Woolf. This was the main message of the whole exhibition for me. These works arose from each other.

Ritva: In your new works, the strong presence of green, a colour you haven’t used so much before, also catches the eye. Is this possibly related to your move from Helsinki to the Lahti region, and being closer to nature in the countryside?

Jukka: Perhaps, in a way. The city is naturally caught up in an urban context. In the countryside, one experiences the biological rhythm of nature and its cycle of colours and light more intensely. Green is, of course, the colour of life and growth, but in the end, I chose green intuitively, as I usually do with my works, and probably my subconscious had a need for this.

Ritva: The relationship between line and colour has been a controversial point in academic art theory for centuries. The line had the upper hand until colour became independent as its own theme through modernism. In your works, I see them as equal elements. What is your relationship with them?

Jukka: Hmm, that’s an interesting question. We have dealt with this comprehensively in academic education, and I can say that it was a very colourful struggle between masculine and feminine. Admittedly, I have also taken advantage of this division in my works, but right now I don’t see it as a very important issue. I think colour and line are inseparable in many ways.

Ritva: Many young painters are interested in the virtual world, the combination of digital and analogue working methods, and different urban subcultures, but you are interested in painting itself, its long tradition and the physical structure of the painting, and classic painting genres such as the portrait and still life, which you have dealt with recently. Could you tell us a little about what has inspired this interest?

Jukka: My interest in classical painting began at Turku School of Fine Arts in 2004. That’s when I realized that there is something idealistic about classical painting. It seeks absolute beauty and order, and that is its ideal and foundation. Secularized art has commented on this since the 19th century by seeking to expunge or question it, but on the other hand, modern, postmodern and contemporary art are products of a cultural continuum, so even commenting on the classical ideal does not get rid of it as it already resides in our consciousness. Then again, in French rococo painting, for example, I can detect contradictory elements, specifically between the classical ideal and the vanity and depravity of the lavish carnality and lightness of the subjects. There is also a connection here to our values today.

Ritva: “Natura Morte”, the still life – the least appreciated genre in the academic art tradition. It mainly exists today in some margins of art. What is it about it that interests you?

Jukka: The still life provides a framework within which you can work without having to think about what to paint. The question is how to paint. The still life is such a good companion that you can find a whole world that you can spend your entire life exploring. For me, it works best as a painting exercise, and it also allows other ideas to emerge.

Ritva: And the portrait?

Jukka: Like the still life, it is also related to tradition and, of course, to the portrayal of a person. I mainly paint portraits of women, especially women artists whose art interests me. These include Helene Schjerfbeck, whose impressive self-portraits I have interpreted a number of times.

I have also found a new subject in the face of Louise Bourgeois. It feels like that face is an almost inexhaustible source of lived life and humanity. I greatly admire her art because it was born of the artist’s inner compulsion. In my opinion, a crystallized work of art should show that it is indispensable for its creator – otherwise it is easily just an image where the artist’s aspirations lie outside the work. However, I still can’t say why I ended up working on others’ self-portraits and portraits. It may be a process whose significance only opens up over time.

Ritva: You’ve also talked about a starting image. Could you expand on what you mean by that?

Jukka: Already during my studies, lectures based on images were important to me. I still enjoy browsing through art books. Suddenly, I find myself paying attention to completely different paintings or details than the ones I thought I was interested in, or I see different things in the pictures than I did before. I study rhythms and forms that are not actually the subject of the work, for instance the relationships between different parts of the body. A starting image is outlined from these, and on this basis a new version of a painting can be created. The starting image may also just produce a thought or association that moves forwards into something else.

Ritva: You have also made a lot of textile works, and textiles are strongly associated with the handicraft tradition, which you seem to be generally interested in: weaving linen fabrics and carpets, and you also attended a rug and pottery course last year. Can you tell us something more about this?

Jukka: I have always been into handcrafts and I value the skills of the hand. There is something humble and timeless about them. At the beginning of my studies, I made object collages and crafts and combined them. It wasn’t until I had my first exhibition that I really started painting because I realized that painting is, so to speak, “high art”, and that it needs to be done. Apparently now, through my life experience, I’ve returned to my roots. Alongside painting, I need stimuli from outside. Craft techniques can be mastered more easily than painting, and that’s why it suits me.

I have woven linen fabrics because linen is related to the Finnish tradition, but also to the materials of painting, and I’m fascinated by its earthy tones, which vary depending on how it’s soaked. These honest, quiet shades soothe me. Having said that, however, I don’t see any major difference between my paintings and textile work, as both have an idea and an implementation. However, I have recently begun to appreciate the handicraft side of painting as well. Painting and textile work are mutually supportive, and I would like them to have a balanced dialogue with each other without impinging on each other in any way. I have also found that, periodically, I need them both in my work. As for textiles, I plan to study fabric weaving next winter and then make new experimental works.

Ritva: Can you mention some eras that are especially important to you in the history of painting?

Jukka: I’m fascinated by 18th-century French rococo paintings, their lightness and vanity. Actually, I’m interested in that whole era that ended with the French Revolution.

The golden age of Finnish art at the turn of the 20th century is also important to me, especially the paintings and subject matter from the short-lived “pure palette” period, which went on to strongly define our cultural identity. Female painters of the golden age, such as Helene Schjerfbeck and Ellen Thesleff, interest me because they went their own ways and did not paint, for example, the great themes of the national epic Kalevala.

Ritva: In the context of works defined as figurative or non-figurative, spectators are often curious about how the artist knows that the work is ready – how do you respond to this in relation to your own work?

Jukka: It’s difficult to explain. It’s an inner feeling that arises during the process. It’s even a physical feeling, that everything is now in order.

Ritva: Thank you for the conversation, Jukka.

Ritva Röminger-Czako, art historian, curator