False Moves, Light Marks
 
It is odd how some artworks can threaten our vision, hamper the relative ease with which we usually observe time and place.
In Hannu Karjalainen's Man In A Blue Shirt (2006) one sees a composed elderly man, eyes closed, face to face. Aged skin always implies a lived past while the man's resolute expression anticipates the events still to come. The hidden eyes are aware of the past - which is unknown to us - and maybe even of what will happen next. Everything else is evident and in plain sight, until the thick liquid starts flowing over the man's face, is imposed on him. One is placed, as in many of Karjalainen's (b. 1978) works, in between the passage of time, under its direction.
It appears that seeing entails both exposition and imposition. In Karjalainen's works it is not only time that both freely unravels itself and becomes forced. There also exists a tension between the indexical traits of the image - all the residue of the camera's interaction with the world - and the painterly gestures animating and transforming its surface. Man In A Blue Shirt aptly demonstrates this when the weathered skin becomes replaced by the gloss of the pouring paint.
Karjalainen's works create a suspension, often in play literally and figuratively. This suspension (which does not extend to our disbelief) is a matter of gravity, again: literally and figuratively. Most evidently this happens in Woman With Blond Hair (2006), in which the weightless hovering of the blond woman is coupled with the pensive softness of slow motion - two anomalies becoming compossible.
Like the passage of time, also the pull of gravity marks directions in space, which the work's own space then seems to gently dispute. Physical attraction is left unfulfilled, but the image nevertheless becomes pregnant with the sheer density of the undelivered moment opening on itself.
Only the woman's blond hair seems obedient to the force of gravity, the strands of hair hanging down, veiling her face. As if to remark on this, almost to provide a polar opposite of a sort, Woman With Dark Hair (2006) shows a disobedient head of hair, flowing freely in care of an invisible wind. Turbulence and immobility cross. The woman, like Medusa, faces the viewer, both transfixed. The woman's hair acquires an immense weight as an element of her appearance. We may customarily think of a person's hair as a kind of framing for a face, a parergonal element that is kept in check by the face as a whole. Here the supplementary feature assumes control and erodes even the very idea of appearance itself, as well as the certainty of a clearly defined body. The corpus (of the woman and perhaps of the work also) becomes a partly unseen entity, extended in space, with an aura of strands - of hair and of signification.
Many of Hannu Karjalainen's works seem to be about a certain disregard for a selected law of nature, about creating an aberrant condition from which to observe, where that particular force no longer holds sway. This causes other things to happen in turn, odd and unexpected things.
The world of Girl In A Red Sweater (2006) exerts pulls in various directions. Beams of light illuminate an eerie slope: the luster of the wet grass, autumn leaves, no one in sight. The image prepares to carry vision along the seductive oblique slant. It is all the more surprising, then, to witness the body appearing, exhibiting little signs of life and still sliding softly across the grass - the paradoxical movement of a motionless body. In an uncanny way Karjainen's work enacts what Roland Barthes described in photography, when he noted that the photographic image was a "living image of a dead thing", incapable of differentiating between the dead and the living - animating them equally, making them equally real.1
There is something incongruous about movement in general - something ancient figuring in our thinking that Karjalainen's videos take to task. Zeno of Elea captured some of this uneasiness in his elegant paradoxes that argued for and against the infinite divisibility of time and space. Karjalainen (like Zeno) is not concerned only about the transfer of a body from one place to another (be that movement smooth or through a set of cinematographic stages) but also about the space that a particular body occupies. It is not totally resolved where the limits of a body are, nor are its points of disappearance.
Ordinary logic does not apply in these works; this world of ours is not their frame of reference. In the videos there is often great emphasis on things that occur beyond the literal frame, which in turn struggles to contain the tension of the events portrayed. In Girl In A Red Sweater an invisible force reels the woman's body off screen and back, in Man In A Blue Shirt the paint is poured from a place outside the visible frame. But in addition the character have turned inward or aside in various ways, are concealed or obscured, as if within a tear in themselves.
The light of the works is purposefully artificial, the movements seem false, the consistency of objects becomes threatened. The dreamy world of the videos is a carefully orchestrated one; it is like a watchtower, from which it becomes possible to observe the lure of image movement, while being at the same time confined - by the centrality of one's own position - to a kind of blind spot. But this concealment then opens another want of sight, for another kind of light to mark.


Harri Laakso