Black metal, Shakespeare, Venetian revels—the world of Hannaleena Heiska is full
of unlikely marriages and references. She creates frankly surprising images: a
tattooed tiger wearing an elaborate headdress, or masked revelers signaling and
gesturing from out of a wood. Each painting draws from times past and present to
create a densely imagined, instantly unforgettable world.
Considered as a group, Heiska’s paintings seem almost like tableaux for an unwritten
play. Individually, each work functions as the portrait of a new and intriguing
character. The narrative that ties this disparate group together is the landscape
itself. Icy and mystical, dazzling and unrelenting, it’s as much a condition as
a backdrop—a condition to which all of Heiska’s figures are bound.
Heiska’s work narrates the slow passage out of the body and into the spirit world,
or at least something that looks much like it. In her paintings, elements of daily life
slowly recede and the fantastical and the possessed gradually grow more dominant.
Against the gradations of this change, Heiska stages a bacchanal gathering
of masked figures, tattooed circus animals, revelers, and dreamers.
Heiska’s figures live somewhere between the circus and the masquerade, a nomadic
community whose location is never static. They are attached to a version of reality
that is still recognizable to all of us, even if it is not precisely our own. But there is
also another set of characters that seem to have retreated further into Heiska’s icy
wonderland, perhaps beyond the point of return. If the nomadic revelers are our way
into this world, then these other figures are the reason we are drawn in.
Many of Heiska’s paintings feel like A Midsummer Night’s Dream transposed into
an icier setting; the slow undoing of the line between the bestial and the human occurs
in nearly all her works. And as in the play, beneath the revelry and the beauty
is a barely concealed sense of both menace and melancholy. That sense is often at
work in Heiska’s titles themselves, many of which are taken from black metal songs:
Beware the Woods at Night, Beware the Lunar Light (2008), Tragedies Blow at Horizon
(2009), And Love Said No (2008).
Heiska’s most fascinating creations are in the latter stages of this metamorphosis,
characters that mix menace with tragedy. Her paintings have their own kind ofz v
heartbreak: Tragedies Blow at Horizon depicts a demurely masked female figure on
her way to some kind of unbearable change. She sits on a tasseled and embroidered
chair in an abandoned landscape of wintry trees. Her hands and clothes are recognizably
human, but her eyes are blank and her face has been obscured.
These figures have none of the levity of Heiska’s midnight revelers. Instead, they
are melancholic in the extreme, as well as often extravagantly beautiful. That
beauty is almost deliberately purposeless; it is used to communicate the sense of
a lost world, of a time that has passed. The title of Against the Tide (In the Arctic
World) (2009) directly communicates this sense of being cut adrift and out of step
with time. In the painting, a tiger looks out with a regal and piercing gaze. But like
the other figures in this loosely constituted group, he is static and half frozen.
Perhaps the key painting here is In My Kingdom Cold (2009), which plays with the
same idea of stasis and loss. In this work, an antlered figure is draped in an animal
skin. The antlers are decorated with luminous pearls, the hairs on the black pelt
distinct, but the face of the figure itself is slowly melting downward and the eyes
are white and blank. Heiska’s paintings depict hybrids and the meeting point between
two worlds. What In My Kingdom Cold suggests is that those two worlds are
as much between the worlds of life and death as anything else.
That meeting point—the intersection of the familiar and the confoundingly
new, the sense of a world that touches upon our own and yet remains completely
unknown—is where Heiska locates her work. Familiar items become, in this
context, quietly significant. The most haunting visual point of Tragedies Blow at
Horizon are the clasped hands of the figure, clutching at some hazily drawn object.
The pose of the hands is mundane and familiar, but in a sense that’s precisely the
point; it’s the pulsing sense of something human underneath the monstrous and
the strange that makes the painting so effective.
Heiska’s paintings possess an eerie combination of vibrancy and paralysis.
She captures a vanishing but not yet vanished world, a world of both stillness
and unrest. The tremulous quality of the works is in part an effect of the subject
matter, but it also has to do with the very act of painting itself as Heiska
practices it. Working without preparatory drawings or photographs, Heiska
produces each work in a single sitting. The resulting works appear as though
they are in a permanent state of settling onto the canvas. They are moving yet
fixed, living yet inanimate.
That is, in a sense, the hallmark of all good painting, but in this case that is also
the story that Heiska is trying, with her strange family of figures and animals,
to tell—the story of magic and fixity, and the wagers of art and other myths. Her
paintings are full of these narratives, but the real story she may be proposing is
one about both the purposes and frustrations of art. She does this with the lightest
of touches, which is only one of the many successes of her work.
Published in:
The Last Magazine, Issue#3, Fall 2009
text by Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura is a writer based in New York and London. Her writing has been
published in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Frieze. Her first novel, The
Longshot, is out now from Free Press.
Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary
