Articles | Biography | Exhibition: Pursuit | Selected works»
Mise-en-scène and mise-en-abyme
In his oeuvre Jukka Rusanen plays with the charged contradictions of the stylistic codes of Classicism and Rococo: the temple and the theatre, supportable structure and movable scenery, white marble and warm skin, the tones of plaster and rouged cheeks… The refined, controlled and elegant form overflows in the exuberant run of paint. Rusanen often employs pleated cloth and gathered drapery that refer to the classic tradition of art with its formal notions of beauty as well as to the drop-curtain and the meanings of the canvas. The works are also mise-en-scène; while internalising the performance space they question the borders of fiction by adopting the exhibition space as one of their frames. The significance of the curtain or image edge is highlighted; a black curtain turns around and into a sky-blue canvas; the border fringes of a plump locket break out in overgrowth, or a work can consist of a canvas installed in a park to endure the weather, and which slowly decays as a scene of temporal and spatial illusionism: back to nature…
The tradition of painting is an important point of reference to Rusanen, and his scale runs from the sky-blue and spring-green distances of classic landscape painting to Fragonard’s Swing and the domestic Pyykkärit. The landscapes open into diffusion, a spatial illusion reminiscent of the Chinese-styled scene paintings of Rococo, or otherwise they are staged in nature: trees, branches and foliage are stage-lit nightly shoots, finished paintings of dark flowers. It is a question of image within image, casting, the “post-mortem” of tradition between paintings, installations and video works. The video The Swing is set in the borderland between painting and film, its impression of movement is animated as a slow sequence of still images, single prints of a swing. A figurative borrowed subject like the swinging figure in Swing continues from the context of painting into video and becomes abstract again as a trace of paint rolled on the surface, reminding us of bolded calligraphy, and thins out into a ribbon on the border of the fuguration, the figure of the swinger. The works are “in-between” temporally as well: their spontaneous painting-like handsomeness breaks out in traces, afterimages, but they also spring from anticipation, the back-and-forth movement of painting, the moments before and after.
Inkamaija Iitiä
Mise-en-scène: putting on stage; stage setting or arrangement
Mise-en-abyme:image within an image; meta-visuality
Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary