Arja-Riitta Ihalainen:
Sogni d’oro

The name of the exhibition, Sogni d'oro, is Italian for golden dreams. This is how Italians wish each other sweet dreams when they go to bed. 

Arja-Riitta Ihalainen from Pori works in Italy for about a month each year. Her works for the exhibition depict abstract states of being, combining the surrounding reality with her own inner world. Television news shows distressing images of wars raging around the world or of climate change, which manifests more concretely and severely in Italy than in Finland. On sleepless nights, prevailing reality and news images intertwine to form abstract states of being. It is not hopeless. At dawn, the light peeks through the curtain, the everlasting and revitalising sun.  

The three large-scale works that bear the exhibition's name were painted in 2023, but they are also on display for the first time. The other paintings are from this year. The exhibition also includes a three-dimensional painting, Dreams of Sleepless Nights, a tent, where the viewer can, if they wish, concretely enter the painting and become a part of it. 

Arja-Riitta Ihalainen graduated from Kankaanpää Art School 30 years ago, in 1995, so this year is her anniversary year as an artist. 

Ihalainen paints with acrylic on untightened canvas. The paintings may be randomly shaped fragments, as if parts of a larger whole or glimpses of a fleeting moment. She is interested in the space between the material and the immaterial. In one way or another, two realities are often present in the work. Another dimension may, for example, shine with a strange light from beneath the surface. The works depict the experience of being human, which is multidimensional and layered, both visible and invisible.