Jukka Kettunen
Time melted and reformed
TEXT BY Roland Hafenrichter
Illuminating, irreverent but always arresting, Jukka Kettunen is an artist who pushes the boundaries of paint and print to create new meaning from old masterpieces. The great paintings of the Italian renaissance are his primary inspiration.
What fascinates him most about this ethereal and timeless art however, is the way that Time itself has worked and reworked it over the centuries to give it a deeper and more enigmatic power. Decay, fracturing and fading is a creative force that paradoxically both diminishes and strengthens the painting. And Kettunen’s work pushes this idea to the extreme. Capturing photographically a key element from a carefully chosen work - the face of a praying saint or the figure of a defiant queen – Kettunen builds in elements from other artworks before transferring this collage to canvas where he begins “painting”. (By “painting”, he means working it with a multitude of media adding pigment, ink, pencil, glazes as well as scratching, sanding, stencilling.)
Nothing is pre-planned; everything is spontaneous. Some parts are enhanced, other parts are obscured in the same way as gravity, air, movement, chemical compounds (better known as the ravages of Time) randomly change, evolve, remodel a painting. The result is an ethereal re-imagining of an object of beauty into another object of beauty. Alongside the original connotations and those altered by Time and circumstance come a host of fresh associations, interpretations and possible meanings. Kettunen’s beautiful work adds new depths to things which are at once familiar and also beguilingly unfamiliar. They gently ask to be looked at in the new light of a new age
TEXT BY
Göte Nyman
Professor of Psychology, University of Helsinki, Finland, Columnist for FinnishNews
How easy it is for us to imagine the future, recall the past and even imagine the future past awaiting us around the corner! But trying to see the past and present together, simultaneously, makes us puzzled; it is a rare pleasure we sometimes enjoy in everyday life when observing and touching retro style objects or other mixtures of artistic style. This is where the multi-layered art and paintings by Jukka Kettunen invite us to access the world of artistic time and space, to immerse into the collages of time and to see beyond the canvas.
In his “Time melted and reformed” series of artworks Jukka can use classic figural postures and artistic symbols from the past, and overlay them with the forms and views of the present. Scenes emerge where the characters talk to us viewers, of our classic historical past and personal present in harmony, mixed together. Now we can see and experience time, not as a passing moment, but as a collage of past and present living side by side, perceptually interacting and entangled. We see and feel them together, focus on past or present or on both as we like and move in time, without an effort.
The collages of time create tension between the characters or the scenes of the past and now and this is where the viewers will find their personal ways to face and sense these tensions. While it is no news that we all perceive and feel our own, personal realities of the present we also do so about our human and collective-historical past. Because of this, the works of Jukka Kettunen come to us in our present time while preparing us for the potential to experience these collages, past and present alike and keep us curious, to look again.
As it often happens in novel arts, music and even culinary life, a creative combination of elements that we usually meet in separation, invokes new experiences in our minds, something we have never experienced before even though the elements of our perceptions are familiar – but from separate corners of history and today. Looking at Jukka’s works we become aware of the importance to separate perception from experience: while it is easy to perceive and recognize the singular elements of time in Jukka’s artworks, the experiences they evoke when appearing together, will live in our minds only if we dwell into their worlds and forget about the problems of combining past and present. Then we can experience time in a novel way, not as a linear one-moment-at-a-time, but as a parallel constellation of times, futures and past together We can move as we like within the materials and fly in times and their historical spaces opened to us.
In some of Jukka’s works the included figures with classic, historical appearances and background carry the whole work, with its whole content to the present time. Sometimes the emerging human gestures and facial expressions and features make a character of the present to move to the past and in doing so, taking us to their historical worlds for us to see with our modern eyes. Viewing these works we become true time travelers.
What is this world of past and present, the time collage, that Jukka offers for us to see and experience? It is a mystery where future, past and present are beautifully mixed like in an unusual but delicious culinary sensation where time has no walls.