Perttu Saksa
dal 5/3/2015 al 31/3/2015
Segnalato da
5/3/2015
Perttu Saksa
Helsinki Contemporary, Helsinki
Silence as a phrase. The artist directs his gaze to the status of animals in our culture, looking through the animal at the human being and at humanity.
The works in Perttu Saksa’s new exhibition are bound together by the colour red. Once again, Saksa directs his gaze to the status of animals in our culture, looking through the animal at the human being and at humanity.
In the videowork Silence as a Phrase a tranquilly rolling sea slowly turns crimson amid a pared-down landscape. This subject is an iconic reference both to apocalyptic visions of water that has turned to blood, and to the images of the mass slaughter of whales and dolphins that have appeared in the media. The series of photographs of cactuses in this body of works also invokes allusions to the colour red and to the history of art. Crushing the scale insects (Dactylopius coccus) that live on these plants produces the crimson pigment – “insect blood” or cochineal – that William Turner used to paint his red seascapes.
The focal point of the series of photographs Presence is the horse – an animal with which our culture has a contradictory and ambiguous relationship. Saksa has photographed horses in a slaughterhouse, bearing witness to the moment when the animal loses its life at the hand of man, turning from subject into meat. “Life is connected with the face and with eye contact. For as long as the horse’s head remained untouched, there was still something present.” Saksa draws a visual comparison with his namesake saint, Bartholomew, who in Christian art is often depicted carrying his own flayed skin. In the hands of the corpse of this saint, who symbolically continues living, the flesh is literally dead matter, and viewers are shown how the soul wins out over bodily existence. Saksa creates a powerful tension in the photograph by attaching the face of the dead animal to its living body, taking his picture from documentary towards fiction.
“The face is the soul of the body. Covering over the face makes the subject of the portrait vague and precarious, but the desire to look, to see behind the mask, remains. Again, as a gesture, removing the face is a highly macabre and nightmarish thing to do. I wanted to construct the image in the in-between space where the subject is still present, but no longer something that we can look behind. The situation changes and the gaze returns. The flesh looks at us.”
The title of the exhibition refers to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s idea of how language and shared narratives are no longer adequate for delineating right and wrong – for a universal ethical frame of reference. In this state of affairs feelings are the only viable means of communication, free of the limitations of language and culture. “Feelings as a phrase for what cannot now be phrased.”
Saksa has discovered a literary variant on this same idea in Stanislaw Lem’s science-fiction novel, in which the ocean-covered planet Solaris makes contact with the scientists who have come to explore it, by reflecting back to them their own memories, and through that their feelings. Without words and the means of communication familiar to human beings, it remains unclear what and why the planet is communicating, and whether its reality is comparable to our own. Something is also reflected in the gaze of the horse depicted by Saksa:
“When I look at the picture I project my feelings over the horse’s body, and I see how the light traces in the image a cold reflection from the dead horse’s still-open eye. There was something dreadful in this, but still the kind of thing that I wanted to look at again, so that I could understand what it might be about.”
About the artist:
The photographer and visual artist Perttu Saksa (b. 1977) graduated with a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, and is now a doctoral student at Aalto University. Saksa’s works have been shown in numerous solo and collective exhibitions, and have been acquired for public collections in Finland and abroad. His previous solo exhibition at the Gallery, A Kind of You, was seen in autumn 2013. In 2014, Saksa’s earlier work Echo won the Fotofinlandia award.
Image: Perttu Saksa, Mask, 2015, 150 x 190 cm
Opening: Friday 6 February 2015
Helsinki Contemporary
Bulevardi 10
Helsinki
Opening Hours:
Tue - Wed 11am to 5pm
Thu 11am to 6pm
Fri 11am to 5pm
Sat - Sun 12pm to 4pm