Reima Nevalainen’s use of collage and décollage is intimately connected to the thematic content of his paintings. What we see on the canvas are vestiges of a complex process of cutting, ripping, and erasing. His technique involves a laborious process of addition, removal, trial, and error. For Nevalainen, painting is a way of scrutinizing physical reality and the way we perceive it – painting is an antidote to the disembodied stream of images that consumes our daily existence.

Humans and nature serve as the subject matter of Reima Nevalainen’s collage paintings – not as conflicting elements, however, for human figures and nature coexist as equals in his compositions. Nevalainen mines his subject matter from personal experience, trusting in the intuitive power of the subconscious. The sense of intimacy is heightened by his multi-layered collage technique, in which he combines paint with materials such as sand and paper, or scrapes away the paint to reveal contrasting surfaces underneath.