BUY SAUSAGES – Hanna-Riikka Heikkilä

Gentle humor reminiscent of a nursery rhyme

There are birds, sausages, trees, and squirrels. There are also mushrooms and bananas. The subjects of Hanna-Riikka Heikkilä’s paintings are concrete and recognizable. The works are either cheerful or melancholic.
What’s essential is that they don’t laugh loudly, nor do they cry out loud.
They traverse the emotional scale of the northern temperament and rely on subtle hints and observations. There is serenity in the works. They are art of still moments, calm and inviting rest.
The fundamental tone of the paintings is deeply human. Their soft expressionism is delicate and light.
Some of the paintings contain an underlying restlessness and disturbing undertones that create content-based tensions in the images. Even in these, they are largely marked by absurd humor.
Heikkilä skillfully creates strange associations, amusing juxtapositions, and breaks the composition of the picture space playfully.
The color pink has always been associated with Heikkilä’s works. However, her pink expressionism is not monochromatic. Dark, somber shades live side by side with the pink, almost as strongly.
The figurative subjects don’t rely on the reproduction of reality. They are surreal images from the subconscious. The stories within them are told by the viewer.
Heikkilä does not construct stories in her paintings, but the drawing style has similarities to contemporary Finnish comics.
Although there are fairytale elements in her paintings, they resemble more poems or nursery rhymes. They meander amusingly, but eventually coil into one cohesive whole, where the rhythm of the lines and the harmony of colors are essential.

Heikkilä draws with a brush. The line appears to be somewhat hesitant. It seeks its path and ventures across the surface of the work, sometimes as a thin thread, other times as thick as rope. She paints living lines over broad, sweeping brushstrokes and clear color areas. In this way, she brings recognizable elements out of an abstract color painting-like background.
The line is the most prominent element in the paintings.
Heikkilä has traditionally painted in a fairly two-dimensional manner. The works play with tense composition and cleverly broken color harmonies, but they are rarely three-dimensional. However, now a new layer of spray painting has appeared on the surface of the images.

After drawing the lines, Heikkilä covers them again; part of the drawing disappears under a layer of spray or brushwork.
Heikkilä uses various sizes of painting surfaces. The tiny ones are suitable for depicting very small details, while large panels can contain an entire world. Her smaller works are often like puzzles: the subject is hidden beyond the edges of the picture, and the viewer is tricked into imagining it.
One enjoys spending time with Heikkilä’s paintings. There is no pressure to understand the contents, grasp the conceptual context, or find art-historical references in the works. It’s much more enjoyable to try to build a story around birds in love or a tangle of sausages.

Veikko Halmetoja
Art critic

Artist talk on Tuesday, September 3rd, from 17:00 to 18:00.

Translated with ChatGPT