Galerie Forsblom April 7 – April 29, 2017
Opening with the artist in attendance, April 6 2017, 5.00 pm – 7.00 pm
“My art is about the timeless fundamentals of existence. People are of the same matter as the earth and the plant kingdom; we are form between two formless entities. My paintings depict humans consumed by nature, just as nature is consumed by humans. All the poetry in the world resides in the inexorable erosion and entropy that occurs within this exchange.”
Reima Nevalainen’s (b. 1984) intense paintings portray people, nature and the dynamic tension between the two. The Years Between Night and Day refers to contrasts in time’s cycle and the unrelenting, slowly evolving approach to the artist’s process. Nevalainen alternates between painting dark and light canvases. The dark-light contrasts do not depict light and shadow so much as background: they constitute their own self-contained reality with its own set of laws. Although he does not work at night, the artist sees the nocturnal hours as a time of ripening: after he finishes his day’s painting, his canvases continue evolving – the paint slowly dries and the traces of the brush become permanently etched on the surface like the cementation of the earth’s sediments.
Nevalainen employs a collage technique to achieve a layering effect, combining sheets of paper, sand, and scratched shreds of canvas. In his latest works, his style of painting verges closer than ever on drawing. Whereas he previously embraced a powerful sense of materiality, he now favors line and the repetition of simple forms. Surface becomes line, and line becomes an abstract system of signs and indices. His art has an organic quality and a strong resonance with nature that evokes the Japanese aesthetic concept of beauty expressing itself as imperfections.
Nevalainen graduated as a painter from the Kankaanpää Art Institute in 2008. He was chosen as Finland’s Young Artist of the Year in 2016. Nevalainen’s works are found in notable Finnish museums including the Helsinki Art Museum and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. The artist is based in Porvoo.