IIDA NIKITIN

Gallery 5, Oulu

11.1.-29.1.2023

I floated on the river and the colors faded. I turned into water, the surface shimmered in the light.

Here you can breathe colors, fire and other elements. Compulsive and tasteless, this collapsed composition: atmosphere, deer (Huittinen), wreaths, mental, memory of water, what is happening, earth, dust, summer night, heartbeat, waterlily, violet, grove, anemone – –

There is something unifying in my works without regularity. Symbols and tags create associations with the known and the strange, pictorial writing. I load everything there is into the paintings until there is nothing left: a trembling feeling, an empty space, silence, a break. Watercolors create a transparent experience, fragile layers, mutually reflecting spaces and time levels.

Animals, people and objects are catalysts for inner sound, energy flow, impulse, mental exercise.. A similar stoppage of gesture and narration can happen in a performance, where improvisation and composition with objects are born until they lose the meaning given to them and grow into some kind of selfish force, breaking between objects when they come to them, to abstraction.

Blue ball, Prussian blue, spaces after spaces, infinite, surface, landscape, Turner, salmon rise, color of water, pets, colors are tinted, emotional blue, compulsive green, pink collapse, feels strange..

Tunteellinen siishii –Sentimental blue is a fantasy world between meaning and meaninglessness. There, the atmosphere is created by means of vague expressionism and formless starting points. The language breaks into sounds in the cross wave of two languages (Finnish, English), the gesture that produces the symbol is interrupted and the direction changes.

I was thinking about the poem Sentimental Hedgehog from Kirsi Kunnas’s Tiitiäisen satupuu (1956). Hedgehogs are lovely – Oh little hedgehogs! Oh man! .. I struggle with sentimental expression that is emotional and looking for an easy solution, it’s an expressive paradox.

I try to avoid teaching, but sometimes I succumb to moralism. In the poem, the hedgehog, after first praising his good features, is left alone to cry under his thorns: a soft core in the shadow of a hard shell. As a child and as an adult I have admired the poem. Hedgehogs have fallen into a bad position in human culture…

I also relate to the metaphor of a (sacrificing) person and his feeling of disappointment. It is a question of disappointment in oneself and the community, the inability to change inwardly and outwardly directed (prickly) destructive activity – a tragic story about the emotional intelligence of humanity and the overemphasis on the individual..

..I paint what I feel, what I have seen and experienced. The works exceed my aspirations, forming unexpected settings and force fields. Theatricality changes in an instant to a feeling about some detail. The paintings are born in time and place, I myself perform in the middle of this emergence. I think of paintings as intensities, bodily experiences and different directions of gaze. In my paintings, the atmosphere develops between the dramatic and the pathetic. I use automatism to find starting points for the work from the subconscious: relationships between shapes and lines and surreal transformations.

Keywords:

Tunteellinen – Sentimental: see above.

Sii is half a hedgehog (siili in Finnish), Si would easily lead to blue (sininen in Finnish). Transliterated into English sea (meri in Finnish) or see (in Finnish to see, look at, understand, imagine, etc.).

Shii like she – he, siihii – .. nonsense, an imagination where things and concepts come together until they separate, some (small) entity in a story-like environment; the sea she,that is a sea creature.

Sentimental blue, i.e. blue that appeals to emotions, i.e. tasteless mush, a reference to the sea and melancholy, ”I got the blues”, everything is not narrative and something is left unsaid.

Painting: rules apply and don´t ..