Waiting for Catharsis… – Heikki Hautala

My work deals with modern confusion, the individual caught in the crossfire of stimuli, the amount of information and its weight. Performance orientation, superficiality, haste, stress, questionable technology, materialism, extreme commercialism, unchecked greed, narrow-mindedness, environmental issues, lack of alternatives, on the other hand, the abundance of options, guilt, violence, intolerance, hypocrisy, the homogenization of cultures… just to name a few of the struggles contemporary people face. I can only speak from my own time, my personal experience and perspective, and I do not claim that things were better in the past or that people throughout history have not faced their own existential and societal struggles, but I find the task of grasping our time and place to be complicated.

Art, whatever it may mean, its various forms of expression, and especially its creation, is for me the examination of stimuli, pinning them as images onto canvas or paper, sometimes as sound, text, or action, in short, as works of art, in some form more or less permanent, acknowledging chaos and simultaneously striving to control it.

This text was created with AI assistance.