SUSANNA VUORIO Paintings 20.9 - 8.10.2006 My paintings are scenes from the life of human animals. My work deals with human beings, their lives and the space that is defined around them, the endless space, the locked-up, wretched space, the amount of space that is left by the limits set by society. For me, the painting is a field in which something happens, or is not happening. Sometimes, what happens is stagnation, emptiness. It is perhaps the situation of being an outsider, an onlooker, a position that is narrative and seeking of contact. The works are born unguided, out of the process of making, usually without a preliminary plan or an "idea", without a schema or a model. The paintings become objects delimited onto the canvas by an amount of paint, a number of colours. They are not dreams of a world that is not real. I used to make use of commonplace signs and recognizable codes to give the paintings a sense of familiarity, to define the subject matter. Now the references are fewer and less direct. The character, the figure, and its gaze, has become the focal point of my investigation of our being here, in the unstoppable flow of the world. Susanna Vuorio |