Strange Light – Once Upon a Time Somewhere, Timo Sälekivi and Päivi Hintsanen

Timo Sälekivi
Strange Light – Acrylic paintings from 2004–2009

Cityscapes from the Bird World

In my paintings, I depict ordinary, everyday moments from the lives of bird characters and the details of their environments—apartment buildings, parks, and harbor areas. However, the ultimate purpose of my images is to convey a certain emotional state or atmosphere, with all visible elements serving merely as tools for expression. This is why I don’t adhere strictly to realism. This allows for a bird, a beetle, a human, or a dog.

Many of the paintings in the Strange Light exhibition were created without sketches, through improvisation. I have looked for the beginning of an image in the splashes of paint. By following the traces of scrap metal printed onto acrylic paint, doors, staircases, the head of a bird, the armor or legs of a beetle have emerged. Sometimes the final subject appears immediately, but often the piece is nearly finished before the form and purpose become clear.

The flow of consciousness brings with it both the mood and purpose of the images. In many of my works, the bird characters have emerged from the collision between imagination and nature. I prefer to depict humanity rather than humans themselves, and for this, any character will do.

Päivi Hintsanen
Once Upon a Time Somewhere – Pigment prints from 2007–2009

In the exhibition Once Upon a Time Somewhere by the artist Päivi Hintsanen (born 1970) from Jyväskylä, there are images where real places have blended with invented ones, and elements of reality flicker in the imaginary world. The exhibition now seen in Pori is a combination of three previous exhibitions. The full collection was earlier shown in a slightly different form in Lahti at Galleria Kipinä in September 2009.

Hintsanen’s exhibition takes place at the border between myth and reality, where fairy tales have already been lived and only the fragments of stories and dreamlike—even nightmarish—memories remain. The walls showcase works from two exhibition sets. The fairy tale-themed Once Upon a Time… exhibition was shown in Jyväskylä in 2008, and the theme continued with the Elsewhere exhibition in Jämsä in the summer of 2009. The visual world of the works has been influenced by fairy tales, but not from the contemporary Cinderella, where the stepsisters try on the glass slipper without shedding blood or losing their heel and toe, but from the fairy-tale world where Hansel and Gretel get lost in the woods at their mother’s request.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Gone, a series consisting of 200 individual works, which was first presented in an installation form in the summer of 2009 in Jyväskylä. The works in the Gone series are small portraits that also belong somewhere beyond this reality—but perhaps not in the same place as fairy tales.

This text was created with AI assistance