Gallery Katariina is delighted to present the exhibition The invisible human by Kalle Turakka Purhonen 8 November – 1 December, 2024. We warmly invite you to the exhibition opening on Thursday, 7 November, from 5 to 7 pm!
Image: Kalle Turakka Purhonen – Märkä lumi (2023), watercolour on paper, 61 x 55 cm
Kalle Turakka Purhonen: The invisible human
”My exhibition The invisible human consists of nature themed watercolour paintings on paper. I paint mostly straight out of perception, on site, somewhere else than in my studio. The visual phenomena of the outside world are endlessly rich and fascinating. They live and change according the light, the weather and the seasons.
Only a part of my education as a visual artist was about academic painting or drawing, and only a fragment of that was done with watercolours. I don’t have a clear method of painting realistic landscapes and the idea of ’replicating reality’ with painting sounds very pompous. I think my work is a dialogue with the visual world and myself. I believe that when you reach out hard enough, trying to captivate something challenging, you end up pulling something out of yourself. Something that otherwise would have stayed hidden.
Watercolours are a great tool for this. The soft brushes very directly mark down the moods of the painter; the determination or the lack of it. Water, the colours and shining white paper are a great combination to execute something quickly, or to build something slowly with many layers. As I really can’t say what kind of a person I am, it is good to have an instrument that plays in many ways.
My last exhibition was about the everyday sights of my home town Porvoo. To contradict this, I now wanted to paint only nature. I use the term nature here in a very traditional sense, as something opposing the manmade culture. As an artistic motif it has been done many times throughout the art history and in the hands of an amateur watercolorist it easily turns into something kitschy. I am not surrounded by wide natural landscapes; my nature is mostly the little woods and bushes where I take my dog out. I wanted to paint diverse pictures of the nature, but mostly ended up painting trees. Maybe, as a human in a landscape, the trees are the easiest things to identify yourself with. Often I found myself arranging the nature in my paintings into still lifes, portraits, interiors or ’landscapes’. I also wanted to paint views from a grass root level, still trying to avoid getting into abstract fragments – witch can also be a laborious task to paint on site in a forest for a sort-sighted middle aged landscape painter.
The Invisible human in the title of this exhibition is the human cropped out of the picture. It is me as a painter, portraying nature through my lenses, whims and limited skills.
This exhibition was painted during the past two years. I want to thank the Kone foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the city of Porvoo for supporting my work during that time. And I want especially to thank Pauliina for watching together and pondering over these pictures with me.”