Lost Paradise
By Jeanette Gustafsson
From August to October, the Swedish art public was exposed to Finnish artist Osmo Rauhala at Millesgården in Stockholm. In an exhibition composed of monotypes, paintings in wax, film and video, Rauhala produceds images sprung from the natural history of his homeland.
Like a migrating bird, Rauhala spends the winter creating art in his New York City studio and the summer operating an organic farm near Nokia in Finland, which has been in the family since the 13th century. With his reverence for nature, a sensitivity fostered by his family�s ecological approach to agriculture, at an early age Rauhala discovered the symbolic significance of the Finnish forest deer as a totem representing the Finnish self-image, as depicted on Stone Age petroglyphs. Rauhala has created a contemporary equivalent to these ancient ancestral stone carvings by projecting Spring (2004), a video of a deer drinking from a forest brook at night, through a sequence of twelve glass plates which slowly revolve from the ceiling. Scattering the multiplied deer forms around the four walls, the film is a hypnotic and ever-changing living fresco.
Another video, The Book of Life (2004), uses a similarly spare technique, projecting the image of the DNA alphabet for the genetic code through prismatic Plexiglas, generating a vortex of letters streaming over the floor towards a black hole into which they merge. The paintings in oil and wax use a closely related iconography from the Nordic forest – deer, birds, wildcats. A pair of paintings entitled Witch Trial (2002), depicts the remains of aquatic fossils, which have been invested with preserving the souls of woman unjustly accused and summarily executed by drowning for witchery in 16th century Finland.
The exhibition’s earliest work, The Secret of the Forest (1989), is painted with oil mixed wax and contrasts the modern conception of life divided into units of linear time with the primeval totem of the forest deer head, its antlers stretching beyond such confinement. Rauhala�s monotypes generate a consistently darker ground depicting the evolutionary roles of attacker and prey. Titles like Solitude (2004), Replication Carnivore (2004), and End of the Road (2004), anticipate a carnage not represented, but implicit in the natural order.
Rauhala’s visualizations of scientific concepts — chaos theory, system complexity- stemming from his ecological world view have found an appreciative and receptive audience far beyond the usual confines of the traditional modern art world.
For press pictures see: www.millesgarden.se
Video: Spring, 2004
Waxpainting: The Secret of the Forest, 2004
