January 17, 2025 by Roy Haapakoski

IN THE AIR TONIGHT

Makasiini Contemporary
Turku FI
10.2.–2.2.2025

Paintings of nostalgia

The starting point for these paintings is the meticulous childhood memories —those I cherish and recall in my own way. Mint ice cream, orange plastic chairs, the pungent smell of a copy machine in the basement of my father's workplace, a lost tooth in a Pepsi bottle, a mining waste pond. The trigger for memories is often a scent or a taste, which in my paintings transform into chemical compounds such as helium, ammonia, or sulfur.

In 17th-century medicine, nostalgia was classified as a disease. The modernization of society and rural migration caused a longing for the past and what was lost, largely driven by urbanization. In my paintings, I work through memories from the 1970s and 1980s, reaching from the digital 2020s towards something "authentic" and collectively recognizable.

Paradoxically, memories are both precise and powerful, yet also unreliable and possibly even self-deceptive. Still, they are a crucial part of my identity. This contradiction resonates with the nature of abstract painting, which distances itself from depicting the visible world and allows the viewer to reflect their own emotions into the artwork.

This exhibition is supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.

January 12, 2025 by Roy Haapakoski

Territorial Behaviour

Blue Shop Gallery
London UK
3.–27.10.2024

Heavy matters handled in lightly

Showing in London for the first time, Blue Shop Gallery presents Roy Aurinko’s solo show ‘Territorial Behaviour’. This brand new body of work from the Finnish painter explores ideas around boundaries and borders, inspired by a frustration with digital discourse, depicted in paint and mark pushed onto the surface. Aurinko explores contemporary themes of communication as a way to explore and further understand the ways we intuitively and defensively guard our thoughts and opinions. The chasm between all of our own human experience, the blank space between islands of paint.

“Debussy once wrote that music is the silence between the notes, and I approach painting in the same way. Even though my way of painting is crowded and frantic, its foundation is built on a quiet, negative surface.

For this new body of work, my starting point for my paintings was a double meaning: firstly, it started as a frustration with the internet discussion culture and, more broadly, with the overall narrowness and one-sidedness of everyday communication: people’s territorial behaviour in comment sections, unintentionally misunderstanding the clickbait headlines, creating an ‘us and them’ mentality.

Secondly, this territoriality resonated with new ways of structuring a painting compositionally. In my work I tend to blur the line between painting and drawing, using pastel and pencil marks to create painterly accents in my visual language. I started drawing boundary lines on the canvas, wondering if I should honor or defy them. I quickly came to the conclusion that I don't want to focus only on negative feelings, but approach boundaries, real or imagined, through curiosity. So, the starting point shifted from petty territorial quarrels to curiosity around crossing borders, developing more spiritual, even esoteric tones in the paintings.

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.”

― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

In summary ‘Territorial Behaviour’ combines two literary images in the back of my head, Steinbeckian rugged mysticism and Italo Calvino's instruction: heavy matters should be handled lightly.” - Roy Aurinko, 2024

August 17, 2024 by Roy Haapakoski

HEAVY BREATHING

Simchowitz Gallery
Los Angeles US
4.–31.8.2024

Nostalgia paintings

Simchowitz is pleased to present Roy Aurinko: Heavy Breathing, the first U.S. solo exhibition by Finnish artist Roy Aurinko.

Roy Aurinko (b. 1972), who lives and works in Heinola, Finland is known for his diverse techniques and a rich palette using oil, pastel, and acrylics to create orchestrations of color and gesture. In this body of work Aurinko calls “nostalgia paintings” he evokes fond memories from childhood. Some of these cherished moments are, in the Artist’s own words, “The usual stuff, you know: mint ice cream and orange plastic chairs. The smell of the copier in the basement of my father’s workplace. The odor of fresh sand and cement at a construction site.”

His canvases convey a sense of natural processes, capturing sublime moments of order amid apparent chaos. For Aurinko, memories are an important part of his identity noting the paradox of memories being both accurate and powerful as well as unreliable and deceiving. He says, “This contradiction resonates with the essence of abstract painting, which distances itself from the description of the visible world and gives the viewer space to reflect their own feelings into the work”. Aurinko’s approach to painting is deeply analog and physical. His entire practice revolves around gesture, senses, and bodily connections. This tactile experience is essential to his work, emphasizing the laws of contact and corporeality.

Aurinko’s works are a testament to the complex interplay of chaos and order, precision, and spontaneity. Evoking speed, precision, and care, his marks range from fluid strokes to scratched, dripped, and scumbled textures, often featuring meandering lines and labyrinthian patterns that seem carved or pressed into thick passages of impasto. This intricate layering adds a dimensionality that invites viewers to explore the depth and detail of each piece. This series of works shows Aurinko’s technical prowess in addition to his profound engagement with the natural world and the human condition.

November 27, 2023 by Roy Haapakoski

UTTER RUBBISH HYPOTHESES

Frans Kasl Projects
Eindhoven NL
25.11.2023–13.1.2024

Paintings forming hypothesis forming paintings

“Oh man, how I love the science. It’s just utter beautiful how theories are put together, tested and certified. I’d like to think similar kind of method applies to my artistic work. Observation, experimentation, analysis. Every painting forms a new hypothesis and in a good day ‘If P, then Q’ happens. While I am excited about the scientific mindset, many others are not so much these days. The name of the exhibition also refers to the unintelligent atmosphere spawn by alternative facts and post-truth politics type of utter rubbish.”

Utter rubbish hypotheses is Roy Aurinko’s first exhibition in the Netherlands. His abstract paintings incorporate elements of drawing, and are created using a mixed-media technique combining oil, acrylic, pastel and cement. The work process and the feel of the material are present in Aurinko’s works, which invite the viewer to explore their relationship with the surrounding world.

Images: Marcel de Buck

March 02, 2023 by Roy Haapakoski

Analog Distortion

Jarilager Gallery
Cologne DE
19.2.–2.4.2023

Paintings on the border of dissonance

The JARILAGER Gallery meets Finnish painter Roy Aurinko with the exhibition Analog Distortion. Aurinko’s large-scale, rough-surfaced, abstract paintings aestheticize the feeling of dissonance and contradiction. According to him, paintings’ connection to subject must remain indicative. Instead, art is meant to lead us into his emotional journey – at times brutal, at times sublime; everybody is invited to plunge into it and make one’s own interpretation.

The artist approaches his canvases from the perspective of a uniquely “analog” connection. His entire art practice is about gesture, senses and bodily ties. No digital device could substitute or implement this. In these paintings, nothing escapes the laws of contact and corporeity. Large surfaces allow him whole-body interactions. Body is his true medium. He pioneers a hybrid technique which combines oil and acrylic with cement, pure colour pigments and gesso, so that the canvases themselves become a fully tactile experience. When it comes to drawing lines, he even tries to avoid brushes; he’d rather use oil sticks and pastels, as if wanting to radiate – or channel – colours directly from his hands.

Aurinko’s theme is an ambiguous combination of warm childhood memories and ugliness at the same time. His paintings present a suspenseful dialogue between beauty and distortion, unity and discordance. Aurinko loves movement and music; to him distortion doesn’t mean absence of rhythm. From a strictly compositional perspective, he plays with the opposites just like a free-jazz musician would: he pushes harmonies to their limit and enjoys the sense of danger which erupts on the border of dissonance.

Abstract painting consciously distances itself from the representation of the visible world, and it becomes a space for imaginary mediations, reflections and doublings. Encompassing distance is the key to contradiction. That’s why there is no better place for contradiction than abstract art. Ugliness can coexist with beauty, heaviness with lightness.

Text: Marta Cassina / Jarilager Gallery

July 24, 2022 by Roy Haapakoski

Eating a vegan sandwich on the train while listening to country music

L21 Lab
Palma de Mallorca ES
8.7.–30.9.2022

The group exhibition curated by Francesco Giaveri

Eating a vegan sandwich on the train while listening to country music is the fourth in a series of five exhibitions celebrating the tenth anniversary of L21 gallery. Curated in collaboration with Francesco Giaveri, each group exhibition is articulated around a part of the human body and a series of literary texts, establishing connections between the visual and the word. On this occasion, Cormac McCarthy’s writing is chosen to explore the importance of the knee, going “to the bone” and its movement.

“We’re going to be okay, aren’t we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That’s right.
Because we’re carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire”.

(excerpt from Cormac McCarthy: The Road)

Participating artists:

Elena Aitzkoa, Roy Aurinko, Renata de Bonis, Bram Braam, Lucía C. Pino, Stephen Felton, Sebastian Helling, Kirsten Hutsch, Royal Jarmon, Daniel Jensen, Aneta Kajzer, Geran Knol, Alejandro Leonhardt, Mira Makai, Nat Meade, Anna Nero, Julia de Ruvo, Gabriele de Santis, Teresa Solar, Fabio Viscogliosi

Text: Raquel Victoria / L21

April 06, 2022 by Roy Haapakoski

Enriched Landscape

Rikastettu maisema
Heinola Art Museum FI
29.1.–4.3.2022

Paintings of environmental destruction’s aesthetics

Roy Aurinko deals the effects of mining through his childhood memories in an exhibition at the Heinola Art Museum. His abstract paintings aestheticize the landscape shaped by mining. “The subject is contradictory to me: a combination of nostalgia and irresponsibility. It is also an aesthetically fascinating starting point for the works,” describes Aurinko.

The artist has grown up next to an open-pit mine in Ostrobothnia, Northern Finland. The Hitura mine, founded in 1970, was located four kilometers from home, and a little further afield was the Makola mine, which was established in the 1940s and has since closed. Aurinko says that the topic has been on his mind for years, starting with the news of current mining devastations in Finland. “I haven’t caught on to it because I thought painting was too slow apparat to deal with such a topical issue. However, 10 years later, the question of the consequences of the business operations of the mining companies operating in Finland and the environmental impact of future mining projects is the most topical. ”

The works in the exhibition he has painted with a mixed technique combining oil, acrylic, pastel and cement. “Despite the name of the exhibition, there is no landscape painting on display, but the connection of my non-figurative paintings to the landscape is mainly indicative. However, I would believe anyone who has seen similar mining areas recognizes a familiar atmosphere in the paintings.”

August 16, 2021 by Roy Haapakoski

Medusa's Mirror

Medusan peili
Gallery Huuto, Helsinki FI
30.4.-23.5.2021

Paintings of imagined sublimity
In the works featured in this exhibition, I examine ways of looking: distancing observations from the object and making one’s observations more sublime. As my starting point, I have used an optical device used for examining landscapes. Also known as black mirror, the device was named after Claude Lorrain, a French 17th-century landscape painter.

In the 18th century, landscapes were considered esthetically crude when viewed with the naked eye. Through the Claude glass, those examining the view imagined that they were looking at a beautiful painting instead of vulgar nature. After finding a particularly picturesque landscape, a person would take the Claude glass, turn their back to the landscape and examine it through the mirror that cropped and blurred the view, making it more esthetically pleasant. The Claude glass is related to the concept of sublime developed in the 18th century, according to which a person’s feelings reflect natural phenomena and one receives imagined sublimity and greatness as if they were part of the phenomenon. I approach the concept of sublime from the perspective of visual arts where one could think that the aim is to achieve an esthetic experience or perhaps event feelings of holiness, manifested as astonishment, respect and wonder both when seeing the final work and while working on it.

The name of the exhibition refers to Italo Calvino’s interpretation of the Greek myth, according to which Medusa’s eyes, which will turn one to stone, can only be avoided by observing the monster through a reflection. Calvino interprets the myth so that, in literature, heavy topics should be approached indirectly, through lightness and reflections. In my mind, the Italian writer’s view resonates in the nature of abstract painting that consciously distances itself from the representation of the visible world.