Painting Documents

April 13, 2008 @ 5:55 AM - by Deeli

...to see Valtteri Kivelä’s exhibition Painting Documents at the TM Gallery in Helsinki. I took a photo of the exhibition with Greg’s old phone to post up here, but I can’t get it off the phone, so here you have Valtteri nollieheeling over the steps and into the bank few years ago instead.
But that’s just as well, really, as the exhibition doesn’t show the paintings either in the strict sense of the word. Instead of hanging them on the walls like you usually would, Valtteri has melted his paintings and molded them into tiny little cubes of beeswax and pigment that he paints with, along with little storage boxes and a small photo of the original paintings that no longer exist. Ooh, conceptual, you say, but hold back your criticism. This is more than just an idea. The little cubes and boxes look extremely good in the big white gallery space. All sorts of unpredictable thoughts went off bouncing about in my little head, when I stood there in front of them. In away the work is commenting on the fact that it’s so easy to produce stuff these days that we produce loads of it without stopping to think what the hell for. The idea of going through the trouble of painting all of these beautiful things (judging by the little snaps) and then melting them down so they take less space has something silly and serious about it at the same time. So yeah, last chance to see it today. The cubes go back in their boxes and those boxes go into a little bigger box at the end of play today. Who knows when they’ll see daylight again.