Masiinoita Miehenpäitä Maalauksia – Tapio Haapala

In my exhibition, I present individual paintings as well as a machine designed for viewing the paintings. I have been planning to build this machine for a long time, and now the opportunity arose, thanks to a working grant from the Satakunta Arts Council.

The machine humorously engages with the masculine world. According to my wife, us men are always designing some kind of machine when we should be doing even the simplest of tasks. Perhaps it’s a typical male trait, a certain engineer-like quality. While building the machine, I tried to combine aesthetic requirements with practicality, so that the machine would truly function, allowing paintings to be browsed and viewed through it.

The main idea was to create a traditional mechanical device where the cause-and-effect relationships of its functions are clearly visible: when I press this, that part moves over there. Even so, this posed enough of a challenge for my modest mechanical skills, not to mention if I had included pneumatics or electric motors in the machine. The core structures of the machine are based on an old cast-iron frame mangler, from which the title of the work, DIABOLO no 3, is derived.

At one point, I realized that this was also about a certain image of the artist: a simplified enlightened form, from the middle of empty canvases, individual artworks emerge. However, another premise for the piece was also the question of the artist’s livelihood. The idea was to combine a painting with a vending machine, where for one euro, you could view one painting – a sort of painting jukebox. This idea, however, was not realized due to the aforementioned mechanical limitations.

The machine contains 24 paintings, and in addition, the exhibition includes a few larger paintings (which did not fit into the machine). While painting, I’ve been reflecting on identity formation, transparency, layering, history, hiding, and being visible. The subject is, of course, the male head or figure in general. Most of the paintings were completed partly alongside the construction of the machine in 2008-09.

This text was created with AI assistance