Across the Skies
On the studies, speech, and art
of Elina Merenmies
Silja Rantanen ⎜Visual artist, Doctor of Fine Arts
In Brussels and Prague
Elina Merenmies began her studies in Brussels and continued them in Helsinki and in Prague. In their form, her studies resemble what in musical terms is known as a rondo, in which themes diverge from their starting point and return to it again and again. Foreign and domestic studies followed one another at first in reverse order compared to the usual, and straight after, the chain of events was repeated in the order we are used to: studies in Brussels came first and only after them, domestic studies, which were, in turn, followed by studies in Prague. Her stay in Prague lasted for three years, after which followed a phase in Paris, and once again a return to Finland. The route went from Helsinki to Brussels, back to Helsinki, Prague, Paris, and back to Helsinki again. In all, her studies lasted eleven years. Studies such as these span a lifetime.
The dynamic start in four countries has shaped Merenmies as an artist in a decisive way. Studying abroad shielded Merenmies during a delicate developmental phase from the more negative national traits of our country. Within small cultures, the pressure for uniformity is stronger than in older, larger cultures. In Belgium, Merenmies was surrounded by one of Europe’s most experimental art scenes, while artistic experimentation was still in its infancy in Finland. In the Czech Republic, she found a visual world that resonated with her inner landscape. The everyday reality of Prague’s academic teaching became a temporary obstacle on the road to self-discovery, but the significance of occasional setbacks pales by comparison with the fact that the artist spent her formative years without sparing herself.
A young artist’s initial years of study are always a mix of striving for independence and pushing boundaries on the one hand, and the actual crux of the matter, that is, artistic blossoming, on the other. For a 21-year-old, managing everyday life and the dangers one has got oneself in consumes nearly all available energy. Fortunately, Merenmies was guided by her ideals to places that were right for her artistic nature, where valuable impulses were filtered through the struggle for survival. Merenmies describes being ”very, very poor” and immensely hardworking. She worked around the clock and slept little, as she understood that her calling demanded hard work. The wild descriptions of the early part of artists’ journeys are very true. Attempts to strip away the romantic aura surrounding artists’ youthful experiences with notions of “we’re all just people here” amount to glossing over the reality. Fantasies of what Brussels and Prague might have to offer are key to Merenmies’ becoming an artist, even though these cities did not offer exactly what she was looking for. When she describes in her own words how she found herself as an artist in Prague, the image does not include external artistic impulses of the town she studied in.
Already while studying in Brussels, Merenmies had been accepted to the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, but she decided to continue her studies in the department of painting at the Institut de Saint-Luc in Brussels. This was a genuine choice, as there were two options. The countries and cities in which the young artist chose to study were an untypical solution. The Finnish art world’s perception of Europe is dominated by a North–South axis, as we have traditionally understood the Mediterranean sphere of influence as our cultural model. Belgium and the Czech Republic are, instead, located at the opposite ends of an East–West axis, and from Finland, we cannot really fathom the geographical width of Europe. Prague is in Central Europe, and is situated further West than we are. Beginning one’s artistic education abroad was an unconventional decision from a Finnish point of view, although not extraordinary from a historical perspective. Central European cultures exerted a more complex influence on Merenmies than on the pioneers of Finnish art who studied in Stockholm, or on those who studied in Düsseldorf during the mid-1800s, or on the Golden Era Finnish artists who continued their studies abroad.
In the 1800s, the reasons for studying art abroad were practical. Before the Age of Autonomy and in its early stages, one simply could not train to become an artist in Finland. Alexander Laureus (1783–1823) was among the first to receive his artistic education in Stockholm in the early 1800s. A group of Turku-based patrons, led by Governor Olaf Wibelius, gathered the funds needed for Laureus’ studies in 1802 and provided him with upkeep in Stockholm, even including laundry done by someone even worse off financially. Such care was not lavished upon Elina Merenmies when she left for Brussels nearly two hundred years later. She worked in squats and had to manage her laundry herself, provided there was running water where she lived. While she lived in her car, laundry had to be done elsewhere or left unwashed. Merenmies wore a scarf on her head to cover her dirty hair. Governors no longer chose artistically-talented teenagers under their wings, as training artists abroad was no longer seen as a matter of national honour.
In the late 1800s, it was common for vocational basic studies to be completed at the Finnish Art Society’s drawing school in Helsinki, followed by further studies in Paris. Some individuals sought education in St. Petersburg, for example Eero Järnefelt (1863–1967), or Reidar Särestöniemi (1925–1981) in the 1950s, when the city was called Leningrad. Sending anyone there to study art in the 1950s with funds collected by a governor was unlikely. Eino Ruutsalo (1921–2001) who studied in New York in the late 1940s was, like Merenmies, one of only a few who began their art studies abroad. In a geographical overview of Finnish artists’ further studies, the axis between Brussels and Prague forms a deviation from the norm.
The impact of further studies abroad are so evident in the works of historical Finnish artists that viewers did not distinguish it from domestic traits. Art historian, Professor Salme Sarajas-Korte’s (1925–2017) doctoral thesis Uuden taiteen lähteillä: Suomalaisia taiteilijoita Pariisissa, Berliinissä ja Italiassa 1891–1895 (At the sources of new art: Finnish artists in Paris, Berlin, and Italy 1891–1895, 1966) gives an impression of the influence of symbolism on Finnish artists, but as was typical for the era of publication, it does not focus on the domestic reception of these influences from a sociological point of view. The following conclusions are, consequently, my own. In the 1800s, foreign influences were like a final seal of professionalism, a symbol of maturity, and there was no reason to hide them. Such influences or their artistic fruitfulness was not analysed or questioned, because in a Finland in which national independence was as yet only arising, it was necessary to accept from abroad all learning that might benefit the emerging state. Influences were equivalent to learning. Central European influences were equally vehemently rejected later, once independence had been gained, in favour of nationalism.
By the time Elina Merenmies left to study in Brussels and Prague, foreign influences were considered neither a sin nor a service to the homeland. In 1988, it was generally clear that influences are adopted from wherever they are available. Influences that are on offer somewhere else rather than in front of one’s own eyes cannot be obtained in the immediate and profound sense in which a painter needs them. True expansion does not happen through Instagram, and it still holds true that art from Brussels and Prague is poorly understood in Finland. Indeed, as regards knowledge of Czech art, the present author also lacks an essential contextual piece helpful for understanding Merenmies’ art, but I understand that this is the direction from which illumination into Merenmies’ distinctive quality should be sought.
These days, studying as well as other artistic activities conducted abroad are valued like any activity that promotes international competitiveness, but the enriching impact that experiences gained outside of Finland may have on artists and Finnish contemporary art is unacknowledged, or at least not publicly recognised. Artists return home changed. Also Merenmies returned a changed person, but artists’ changes do not interest Finns as much as what foreigners might think of us. Foreign influences that deviate from the familiar are given little attention in Finland, and artists are left to their own devices. Instead of the returnees having their artistic souvenirs welcomed as an additional contribution, these artists must work harder to gain viewers’ acceptance compared with artists who studied in Finland. Finnish tastes influenced also the reception of Elina Merenmies’ art when she returned to her homeland in the late 1990s.
Studies in Brussels and Prague were regular, school-like professional studies, unlike the work in the free academies of the Parisian Golden Era. Merenmies did not socialise in the safe company of a group of compatriots, and the works she was creating were not reported in domestic newspapers like the works of the Golden Era male artists were. Instead, she formed connections with representatives of other artistic fields. A friend studying cinema in Brussels was the original reason behind her visiting the city. She first got acquainted with Prague when travelling there to play a gig with her Paris-based band. The music the band played was experimental industrial noise, well-led and rehearsed. Merenmies played a variety of keyboard instruments dressed in an outfit resembling a nun’s, and in some numbers, sang into a prepared melodica, which both amplified and muted the sound. All this activity was fortunate for her development. The bottleneck was the conservative art views of individual teachers. Instead of national isolation, Merenmies has described a mismatch between her student-era works and the norms of the time at the Institut de St. Luc and the Prague Academy of Fine Arts’ department of monumental art.
Belgian art is best known for the painters James Ensor (1860–1949) and René Magritte (1898–1967). At the time of writing in the spring of 2024, Brussels is hosting two extensive exhibitions on the century-long history of Surrealism. Surrealism continued in Belgian visual arts for sixty years, even after it waned in France following the death of poet André Breton (1896–1966). The exhibition showcasing Belgian surrealists titled Histoire de ne pas rire (The History of Not Laughing) at the Bozar in Brussels has received its title from the book of the same name by Belgian surrealist Paul Nougé. The exhibition features Belgian artists not known in Finland, such as Marcel Mariën, Max Servais, E. L. T. Mesens, Rachel Baes, and Jane Graverol.
Today, the most famous Belgian artist is arguably the film director Chantal Akerman (1950–2015). The stark visual depiction of Brussels in her film Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080, Bruxelles (1975) reflects many people’s perception of this city and Belgium as a whole. The negative aesthetic impression of the city is a subplot in the film, but the impact is strong. All pastel tones are mixed with black, and the surface materials of interior spaces are worn and torn. Natural light does not seem to reach inside the apartment at all. It is difficult to say whether Akerman is simply conveying her own experience of the city, or stylising a general perception of Brussels. Today, her acclaimed film contributes to the image of Belgium as a country. The setting of the film, in which the protagonist drifts ghost-like in her own home from one mundane duty to another, is in its vagueness reminiscent of Elina Merenmies’ description of the city she studied in. The downside of a young artist’s openness is a lack of self-preservation instinct:
“Brussels was wonderful and simultaneously completely pointless. I went to Brussels for the first time in the late 1980s. How to express it? Later, one is wiser and understands how things affect us almost secretly. The weird decadence of Belgium crept into me like a leech, and I didn’t notice it at all.” (Merenmies in the exhibition catalogue Nautinto, 2017, 67.)
In contemporary art, Belgium is one of the centres of European conceptual art, along with the Netherlands. SMAK, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Gent, gained broad international interest with two major exhibitions during the tenure of its founder, the legendary curator Jan Hoet (1936–2014). The first, Chambres d’Amis (1986), featured installations of contemporary art hung in the homes of Gent residents, allowing the public to visit and view them. The second, Open Mind (1989), presented the art of mentally ill individuals in the context of contemporary art, continuing the thought process present in the manifestos of surrealists and in exhibitions organised by them in the 1920s and 1930s. Publications from Leuven University and the Gent-based research institute Orpheus exemplify the progressive nature of Belgium’s inter-art and artistic research, or research conducted by artists. The Belgian avant-garde and surrealism of research is united by the possibility of juxtaposing any two things with each other. In Finland, a comprehensive solo exhibition of Gent-based contemporary artist Berlinde de Bruyckere (b. 1964) was displayed at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere in 2018.
Instead of nominal cultural capitals, Brussels and Prague are true centres of culture, whose historical significance remains somewhat obscure to Finnish artists, although, for example, Czech Cubist avant-garde of the 20th century is a significant thread in the abstract art tradition that finally reached Finland, forty years later. Among Finnish contemporary artists, the influence of Czech illustration and animation art can be seen in filmmaker Katariina Lillqvist’s (b. 1963) films Ksenia Pietarilainen (1999) and Butterfly from Ural [Uralin perhonen] (2008). Lillqvist’s puppet animations are reminiscent of Czech animation-film director Jiří Trnka’s(1912–1969) illustrations of, for example, H. C. Andersen’s fairy tales. Trnka’s images and the spatial structure of his puppet animations, where more clearly outlined figures float in washed-out, boundless landscapes, are related also to Merenmies’ works.
Nothing like Jiří Trnka or icon art was, however, to be encountered at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. In the 1970s, during the era of Leftist orientation, students had sought to study at Eastern European art academies due to their solid teaching of anatomy, among other reasons. The fading of anatomy teaching in Western art schools was seen as a sign of degeneration, and the old-fashioned teaching methods in East Europe were explained in a positive light for ideological reasons. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the fantasy in the Nordic countries might have been that the art academies of East Europe would also transition into a new era overnight. This hope was groundless. Even in 1993, a young Nordic artist seeking to study in a country formerly behind the Iron Curtain such as the Czech Republic would encounter conservative academic art education. The teaching emphasised copying plaster casts, which traced its roots back to the Greek ideal of beauty.
At the Prague Academy of Fine Arts’ department of monumental art, some students copied human figures from Michelangelo Buonarroti’s (1475–1564) paintings on the ceiling and end wall of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Their events, though based on Biblical narratives, are handled freely and imaginatively. Copying or adhering to a model was in itself familiar to Merenmies, for example, from icon painting, and it was not an unpleasant idea for her, but the spatial structure of Michelangelo’s paintings, which is the opposite of the spatial structure later adopted by Merenmies, could be seen as foreign for her. In Michelangelo’s frescoes, the intertwined and contorted human figures of the Last Judgement, Purgatory, and Hell rise clearly from the chaos as sculptural forms, distinct from the background.
Knowing Merenmies’ artistic quality, one can assume that she had something completely different in mind when heading to Prague: a visual culture that we in Finland perceive as Eastern. Merenmies rebelled in her visual thinking against the canonised North–South axis of Western modern art, but seeking to go East from the West, she found herself facing the same Greek spatiality crystallised in the art of the late Renaissance in Italy.
Fantasy illustration and surrealist traditions appear in a unique form in Elina Merenmies’ art. These genres are marginal in Finnish art history, which is why Merenmies’ art is often interpreted simplistically as illustrating figments of the imagination. In Finland, it is not common to talk about conceptual contemporary art and Surrealism in the same sentence. Their creators are separated and compartmentalised in people’s minds. Sophisticated narrative colour painting can be characterised as naivist in social conversation, under the pretext of wanting listeners to know what is being discussed, and a clarification is forever left lacking. The reference material applied to Merenmies has in this mental environment remained limited, and her artistic genre perceived as more folksy than it actually is. Perhaps the assumption is that as regards Merenmies, by appealing to imagination, delving into contexts and art historical connections in more detail can be avoided. However, this does not do justice to the artist’s works, because illustration and metaphorical narrative painting themselves do not have sufficient resonance in Finland. Even in Sweden, there is more valued, modern representational colourism, in which artworks tell stories.
Positioning in the recent history of Finnish contemporary art
Elina Merenmies returned to the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki for two years between her studies in Brussels and Prague. After her studies at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts were interrupted after one year, she remained in the city for two years to live and work. She completed her Master’s degree in Helsinki in 1999, and has said that her graduate studies helped her reintegrate into her home country and its art scene. She was taught by artist and Professor Leena Luostarinen (1949–2013), a guiding star in Finnish post-war art. The encounter was fortunate, and the teacher the best and most suitable, as Luostarinen approached painting with a cosmopolitan attitude. Her artistic quality served as an excellent model and guide for Merenmies, because it was not based on expressionism, just like Merenmies’ art was not, but rather on an international mythological imagery and mastery of classical belle matiére visual language.
One of the most inaccurate characterisations of an artist I’ve ever read from a search engine is the claim that Luostarinen’s works are based on expressionism and the artist’s own experiences. Emphasising the materiality of painting has historical roots longer than the new materialism that has gained its title from the philosophical trend of the same name, and Leena Luostarinen was the right artist to convey to the young artist an awareness of this tradition, which has been known by many names. In the midst of the limited Finnish art scene, Merenmies developed a unique connection with the Finnish professor.
Until the late 1990s, Merenmies moved back and forth between Helsinki and her second home city of Paris. During this time, Merenmies became integrated into the recent history of Finnish art, in which yardsticks are different from those used in Brussels, Prague, and Paris. In Finnish art criticism, Merenmies became framed within the context of Finnish painting, with comparisons drawn to find more or less suitable points of reference for her work. She was written and spoken into the narrative of our contemporary art, including its mythologised continuum rooted in the art of the 1980s. The formulaic placement within the recent history of Finnish painting, constructed upon domestic variables, poses an obstacle to understanding any artist.
From the early 1980s’ neo-expressionism onwards, painting in Finland was referred to as “new,” as ironic as it may seem to remind that the paintings of the current era are newer than those of a bygone time. The era of neo-expressionism was followed by a conceptual emphasis, and at the end of the decade, there was a wave of theoretical enthusiasm. During the peak of theoretical fervour in Finnish art, Merenmies began her art studies in Brussels. Finnish painting during the period of theoretical enthusiasm was abstract or semi-abstract, although its interpretations were depth-psychological or linguistic, whereas in the mid-1990s, representationalism returned to Finnish painting, first as identifiable and also personal imageries, then as openly narrative allegorical themes. The discussion of the death of painting had been removed from the agenda following a decade-long shadow cast by New York conceptualism. In Finland, the topic had been exaggerated, because the wave of conceptual art that caused the shadow was a more marginal phenomenon than in New York.
In 2012, the Finnish Art Society organised a retrospective exhibition of Elina Merenmies’s work at the Kunsthalle Helsinki. The artist was 45 years old, and approximately fifteen years had passed since her return from Paris, depending on the method of calculation. The articles in the exhibition catalogue were written by art historian Juha-Heikki Tihinen (b. 1973) and author Antti Nylén (b. 1973).
In his article Ihmeiden äärettömyydessä – matkoja Elina Merenmiehen maailmaan (In the Infinity of Wonders – Voyages into the World of Elina Merenmies), Juha-Heikki Tihinen references the autobiographies of Vladimir Nabokov and Luis Buñuel; Susan Sontag’s essay on Antonin Artaud; Daniil Kharms and Milan Kundera; Jean Cocteau and Tove Jansson as an author. The references include both the authors’ own life experiences and opinions, as well as scenes from their novels. Tihinen uses fiction as a theoretical framework for his interpretation, which is well-suited for examining Merenmies’ art. Merenmies’ art is positioned within the context of literature and its illustration, as Tihinen describes his own experiences with Merenmies’ works through the lens of these authors. The approach is branching, akin to the trees and vein structures of Merenmies’ art: the art historian borrows from writers as describers of the viewing situation. He does not claim that long-deceased writers would have spoken about the exact same subject matter as depicted in Merenmies’ works, but finds in their writings and scenes from their novels something that a contemporary viewer can, through varying the variables, adapt to Merenmies’ art. Merenmies’ imagery is conducive to such an interpretive approach.
Antti Nylén, in turn, in the essay Valkoista mustalla (White on Black) writes about Merenmies’ art based on the background information that the artist is a devout Orthodox Christian, and from the initial assumption that her art is Christian. Nylén analyses Christianity’s relationship with the flesh, that is, the body; he writes about endless repetition as a “spiritual path” and about leaving the soul and spirit unrepresented. Nylén refers to the view of St. John of the Cross on conversion. “The path of suffering is better than the path of joy and action.” (”Kärsimyksen tie on parempi kuin ilon ja toiminnan tie”, Nylén 2013, p. 92.)
On Merenmies’ speech
In 2017, the Helsinki Art Museum HAM and Gösta Serlachius’ Art Museum in Mänttä organised a group exhibition of three artists under the title Nautinto (Pleasure), in which Merenmies, Jukka Korkeila (b. 1968), and Anna Retulainen (b. 1969) were presented alongside each other and juxtaposed with artworks they themselves selected from the Serlachius Art Collection.
In the exhibition book Nautinto, the artists describe their own work more extensively than in a typical group exhibition. In Elina Merenmies’s essay titled Käytännöstä ja käsitteistä (On practice and concepts), an unnamed entity introduces abstract themes to Merenmies under subheadings such as “Doubt,” “Despair,” “Hope,” “Struggle,” and “Desire and passion.” These subheadings, which according to Merenmies were set by the curator Mika Hannula (b. 1967), could just as well be the artist’s own framework of the principles governing her art. The curator has taken what he knows to be the artist’s conviction as the starting point of the questions. Due to this tailored structure, a determined portrayal of Merenmies’ life and art emerges, but one that due to her way of speaking is still as enigmatic as the world depicted in her works.
Merenmies is an expressive and versatile speaker. The tone of her speech, referencing religious confessional writings, is not coincidental. Each theme is grounded in reality and linked to a Christian worldview. Deep empathy is an essential part of Merenmies’ ethos, and as is often the case, meticulous precision is followed by embellishment. The more precisely the artist wants to convey what her work is truly about, the closer she comes to hyperbole, or exaggeration. The ingredients are the same as in Merenmies’ paintings, and even in the same order. In her paintings, precision is followed by exaggeration and the supernatural. The style of speech is confessional, the choice of words surprising.
Merenmies’s language allows for interpreting her oral expression as a carefully edited stream of consciousness. Her narrative style differs not only from standard language, but also from the language I recognise from my early days as an artist in the early 1980s. Artists’ texts were long disparaged as subjective demonstrations of the mind. They were not accepted as sources of information. Since then, artist statements have undergone transformations that reflect the emancipation of artists as a professional group, the arduous struggle for recognition as experts in the field of art, and the changing trends in art theory. In this development, sharing stories from one’s everyday life in printed text became part of artists’ emancipation, an emblem of our growing self-esteem. In addition, Merenmies’ unique speech can also be described as self-disclosure, as religious self-development is a central aspect of her life.
A sample of Merenmies’ speech is her welcoming greeting during my first visit to her studio at the Lallukka artists’ home in the fall of 2022. As she opened the front door, Merenmies proclaimed what I was about to step into: “This is an Orthodox hallway!” The sentence could be straight out of a work by René Magritte; either a title or a stunning proposition painted directly onto the artwork. Magritte-like assertions flow from Merenmies’ mouth from time to time on other occasions as well. In my eyes, the hallway in question was a magnificent and proportionate 1930s functionalist space designed by architect Gösta Juslén (1887–1939), the uncle of my imaginative teacher, architect Tore Tallqvist (1941–2022); however, Merenmies’ definition and my definition do not exclude each other. Icons, Magritte, and Tallqvist fit perfectly well in the same foyer.
When asked about her memories of Brussels or Prague, Merenmies provides fascinating scenes involving bees and glimpses of a tumultuous phase of life, but more detailed analyses of her teachers’ views are more difficult to extract. Professors were extras in the drama of her life. For many artists starting their careers in the 1990s, one’s own life was a political and artistic engine. A central-lyrical attitude returned to painting, even though modernism was considered to be over. In the 1980s’ maxim of artist Henry Wuorila-Stenberg (b. 1949), intended to shock: “Art history begins from my birth.” Merenmies sees her own significance more humbly. In addition to the contingencies of her own life, subjectivity for Merenmies means a continuous self-examination of her own mental space and the confessional nature that speaks of it.
It is a multi-layered metaphor and touchstone for the listener when Merenmies laughingly calls herself an idiot, alluding to an old medical book illustration named after Diego Velazquez’s (1599–1660) painting of the same name: “I’m an idiot!” This is difficult to grasp because Merenmies is not crazy, but rather a cultured and intellectually reflective individual who struggles to reconcile the contradiction between life and ideals, as most thoughtful people. She does, in her letters, follow up these daring associations with a softening “heh” accompanied by an exclamation point.
On analyses of Elina Merenmies’ works
I interpret Merenmies’ works based on what is visible in them and how they are composed. The visual content at the level of immediate visual perceptions has a value in art that is comparable to meaning. Juha-Heikki Tihinen’s visual observations in the exhibition book Salaista iloa (Secret Joy) in 2012 coincide with many of the observations I present in the following image analyses. Therefore, I frequently refer to him in this text.
I rely on the evidential power of similarity. In my eyes, Merenmies’ works are comparable with certain works and artists in modern art history, which does not mean that Merenmies was influenced, for example, by Odilon Redon (1840–1916), Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), or Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), who was part of the Neo-Romanticist group. An observation of similarity in a certain feature between the works of two artists is an empirical fact in visual art. There are mysterious similarities between works of different ages that deserve to be recorded as such without drawing conclusions. What is concretely visible in Elina Merenmies’ paintings? How is the subject framed, how is the surface divided, and how does Merenmies use different shades of darkness?
One can find similarities between Merenmies’ art and that of Pavel Tchelitchew, who is not well-known in Finland and whose art Merenmies is not aware of ever having seen. Pavel Tchelitchew, who was born in St. Petersburg and educated in Paris, was part of the Neo-Romanticist group along with the St. Petersburg brothers Leonid Berman (1896–1976) and Eugene Berman (1899–1972) as well as the French artist Christian Bérard (1902–1949). The Neo-Romantics continued the tradition of the Post-Impressionists in their own colourful and surrealist direction. Tchelitchew’s paintings differ from the rest of the group’s art. His paintings do not show traces of Italian masters’ art as seen in the works of the Bermans and Bérard. Particularly Tchelitchew’s later work, created after his emigration to the United States in the 1930s, features aspects reminiscent of Merenmies. During this time, Tchelitchew adopted a habit of painting the networks of blood vessels visible on the surface of human heads.
The Northern character of Tchelitchew’s art resembles that of Merenmies. Art historian James Thrall Soby (1906–1979), who organised Tchelitchew’s retrospective exhibition at New York’s MoMA in 1942, describes the differences between Tchelitchew and other Neo-Romanticists in a way that would equally well describe Merenmies:
”Tchelitchew’s Romanticism by comparison with theirs is Northern both stylistically and in metaphysical approach. […] In terms of fairly direct analogy, the name of Grünewald comes to mind rather than that of Raphael; that of Altdorfer or Brueg(h)el (sic!) rather than that of Piero della Francesca or Titian.” (Soby in Mauriès, Patrick, Ed., Theatres of Melancholy: The Neo-Romantics in Paris and Beyond, 2022, p. 115.)
The levels of reality in Merenmies’ paintings
The analysis of composition is preceded by the question of what level of reality Merenmies’ paintings and drawings inhabit. This question is impossible to avoid when looking at the mysterious yet distinct events in the paintings. The term “level of reality” here refers to categories such as memory, scientific observation, utopia, world explanation, apocalyptic vision, psychedelic or optical illusion. The question does not refer to reality in the mundane sense, as the concept appears, for example, in media news. They form their own tangled web of reality levels, from which the coloured pattern of strands of actual knowledge is woven. Merenmies’ works are the opposite of news in terms of their level of reality. It would indeed be refreshing one day to hear an hourly news summary on the radio compiled by her. She does not lull herself into the belief that some things are empirical facts, but the viewer must also be persuaded to abandon one-dimensional focus on apparent facts, and that is not always in the artist’s control.
What do collective imagery and personal confession look like in a painting? Is it necessary to know which one is being depicted, in order to receive the work? Is there something that visually distinguishes them, so that I can deduce the level of reality by looking at the composition, or must this be heard from the artist? If it is heard from the artist, should it be taken as viewing instructions, or is one free to interpret the painting as an expression of another level of reality? For example, interpreting religious imagery as a product of imagination is a fundamental objection to faith. And finally, should the unfortunate happen and the level of reality not be conveyed by the painting, how does the artist’s intention come across at all?
All the above-mentioned levels and many more may serve as the foundation of visual art. The viewer deduces from certain visible signs which level of reality is being depicted at any given time. The exhibition title Everything Shows can also be interpreted as meaning that the artist accepts that other things may appear in their works in addition to those the artist is aware of. In the presence of Elina Merenmies’ works, the question of levels of reality arises. Are the rhizomes jutting towards the sky in the forest imagination, or does the subject matter refer to a specific religious text, a momentary phenomenon of light, or a metaphor? The artist may base the distancing effect of their expression on their forests being different from the forests known to the viewers.
Juha-Heikki Tihinen writes that there is something realistic in Merenmies’ paintings that could exist and which as a viewer one finds easy to believe in, while knowing that the world of the painting does not exist. It is characteristic of Surrealist art for levels of reality to blend into one another or remain unclear. However, there are also differences in levels of reality that the artist cannot completely hide even if they wanted to. Something as simple as whether a drawing of a person’s face or head is drawn from a model, from a photograph, or from memory indicates the level of reality of the work.
Illustration art and illustrating religious texts
Illustrating writers’ texts is one level of reality. Depicting self-invented reality in art is also a form of illustration. With the return of representational and narrative themes to Finnish painting in the 1990s, the question of the legitimacy of illustration as an artistic method has gained importance. Comic art has achieved a respected position among the fine arts, but illustration is still a taboo in visual arts and is considered as part of applied arts. Regardless of attitudes, illustration is a central reference point in contemporary art, as most contemporary art is based on information. Various composites that combine texts with images are a common form of artwork. The significance of illustration must be reassessed in the context of Merenmies’ works.
Compositionally, contemporary artists simplify representational imagery using the same logic as illustrators, also political artists and perhaps especially them, because the quick recognisability of imagery is essential in political communication. Shortcuts and unique notations have been developed for politically engaged art, often stripping many political works of aesthetic appeal. Merenmies also illustrates texts, but uses the shortcuts of the symbol system she has created more richly and flexibly than is commonly done.
The frescoes of the Italian renaissance illustrate religious myths, which their contemporary viewers became acquainted with partly through the frescoes themselves. Some of the frescoes depict events or figures from the Gospels of the New Testament. In contrast, some of the frescoes’ imagery deals with saints, future saints, or the everyday life of the monastery at the time of painting, such as the extensive fresco series at the Monte Oliveto Maggiore monastery near Buonconvento in Tuscany.
Mediaeval painters had become acquainted with the lives of Catholic saints through the Fioretti, a popular collection of writings on legends of the saints, read also by many other people. The central character in the book is Saint Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), who lived about 150 years before the book was published. The time gap reflecting the perspective of Italian Renaissance painters corresponds to the one separating our time from Zachris Topelius or J. V. Snellman. Their biographies have so far not been read with such a passion that would have resulted in them inspiring new visual art, but the future is, of course, unpredictable.
The other characters in the more than fifty stories of the Fioretti were not exactly contemporaries of the mediaeval fresco painters or the visual narratives running on the pedestals of small altarpieces either, but they were much closer to their world than the Biblical characters. The events of the stories could be placed in the artists’ contemporary environments in the paintings. Modern viewers do not distinguish between the Biblical subjects and the mediaeval legends in the frescoes, because in both, the backdrops resemble the interiors and landscapes of the late Middle Ages.
In Elina Merenmies’ painting Pyhiinvaeltajat (Pilgrims, 2016), the figures are resting in an olive grove somewhere on the Mediterranean coast, perhaps in Turkey or Greece. The background of the painting differs from Merenmies’ other woodland scenes. Nothing in the work defines its time period. The timelessness of the setting evokes the aforementioned Renaissance frescoes and paintings based on legends of the saints, in which the landscape belongs equally to modern viewers making their pilgrimages by plane and to the pilgrims depicted in the paintings, travelling on foot. The background landscape manages to bridge chronological gaps. This occurs in many of Merenmies’ paintings depicting saints. Her Orthodox saints hide in the deciduous forests of Central Europe.
There’s a distinction between literature such as a novel or a work of non-fiction serving as a source of inspiration for an artist, and it serving as a source of the artist’s works. The only book that has, to my understanding, served as a direct source for Elina Merenmies’ art is the Synaxarion, a collection of writings about the lives of Orthodox saints. The series, published in Finnish as twelve volumes between 2002–2019, was edited by Hierodeacon Serafim Ph.D. (originally Veli-Petri Seppälä, b. 1970). The texts were compiled and translated from Greek, Russian, English, French, and Syrian sources by Hierodeacon Serafim together with Lintula Convent members, Nun Kristoduli (originally Anna-Leena Lampi, 1945–2020) and Nun Ksenia(originally Anu Rovamo, b. 1964), the current Abbess of the Convent. Each month of the year corresponds to its own volume, and each day has its own saints. The stories are short and suitable for continuous daily reading. Elina Merenmies reads the Synaxarion every day, as well as the Bible. The temporal range of the writings is vast, and the stylistic variation considerably small. Publishing the series is a cultural achievement by the Orthodox Literature Council in Finland. Moreover, its structure makes it very readable.
Merenmies’ relationship with the legends of the Synaxarion are, chronologically speaking, comparable with the relationship of the late mediaeval painters with Fioretti‘s Saint Francis of Assisi. The saints of the Synaxarionare actual historical persons from the past two millennia as regards the Eastern church, in other words, from a considerably longer time span than Fioretti‘s characters. The saints in the stories are living actual lives, making them apt subjects of art. Usually, they suffered a martyr’s death. Although many of them have lived and died centuries ago, their lives can be empathised with through these short writings. The repetition of the storylines from one century to another is impressive. In Merenmies’ paintings feature at least the following characters of the Synaxarion: Blessed Saint Xenia of St. Petersburg; Saint Peter the Apostle; Saint Matrona of Moscow; Saint Nikephoros the Leper; Saint Porphyrios, Wonderworker of Kavsokaliva; and Saint Nectarios of Aegina.
Contemporary secularised Christian individuals, including myself, have a superficial understanding of Biblical history and scarcely any knowledge of mediaeval legends of saints. As viewers of art, we are not bothered by the fact that we do not share the religious convictions behind the narratives depicted in frescoes. Instead, our limited knowledge of the subject matter often aids in our aesthetic appreciation of the artworks. However, when a contemporary artist like Elina Merenmies chooses programmatic transmission of religious iconography as her level of reality, I expect explanations and begin to construct them myself. Thus far, explanations have not been demanded from Merenmies by researchers, as art historians and authors who have written about her have had a personal religious conviction, like Nylén, or like Tihinen, an empathetic relationship with the symbolism and myths of visual art. An agnostic who appreciates Merenmies and her art seems to me a fitting and welcome addition to the ranks of interpreters. Problematising the relationship between confessional religious paintings and viewers who, like myself, are sceptical, of different faiths, or non-religious, is needed.
Unfinished paintings compared with finished ones
In Elina Merenmies’ studio at the Lallukka Artists’ Home in Helsinki in the autumn of 2022, I had the opportunity to see a large painting-in-progress entitled Heavenly Host. It is a privilege to see a colleague’s work in its early stages. One understands the piece better, when one eventually sees it finished and can compare one’s impressions of the two stages. Upon first viewing, the painting depicted the outlines of a dimly-lit, dark-toned forest landscape, and in the sky, a procession of red, icon-like images approaching the viewer. The celestial figures were simultaneously beings and images. Their hovering above the landscape in front of the viewer brought to mind an Orthodox Procession of the Cross with its banners.
The uncertainty of beginnings is poorly tolerated in contemporary art. While teaching at art academies from the 1980s to the 2010s, I have during studio visits become accustomed to seeing paintings at various stages of completion. A typical impediment or even a sign of the times is the erosion of the thought of developing a painting from one stage of work to another. Many art students have completely abandoned the gradual change of their work and produce all their pieces alla prima, or in a single session. This has adverse effects, one of which is pedagogical: teaching becomes more difficult when changes in the work cannot be observed and discussed together.
Elina Merenmies’ working method is more organic. The painting grows in layers but not systematically. After the initial layers of tempera, it is still somewhat shapeless. The way in which a painting changes along the way speaks volumes about the artist’s goals. How has the beginning been altered, so as to reflect the artist’s objectives better? When I saw the finished Heavenly Host, I noted that Merenmies had painted the figures resembling icon motifs floating in the sky in a different way from the landscape in front of and beneath them. They appeared like two-dimensional, radiant red discs, or paintings in the sky. The red silhouettes resembling figures in icons became detached from the background in such bright light that they could not possibly exist in the same reality as the landscape. They were positioned perpendicular to the viewer in the same way as an iconostasis, and seemed to approach us across the skies. The visual structure is reminiscent of a painting by the symbolist artist Odilon Redon (1840–1916), in which the profile of a human head floats in the sky. However, in Merenmies’ painting, in accordance with naturalistic spatial structuration, branches of trees are positioned in the foreground, and the silhouettes of the icon figures flicker through them. The completion of the painting, in this case, meant a sharpening of duality.
In the spring of 2024, two or three other works in their early stages were viewable in Merenmies’ studio. Sometimes these early stages, sketched with a large brush and soft-edged forms, are called underpainting or ground-coating, but this does not satisfactorily convey their significance in the genesis of the work. Underpainting sounds like laying a technical base, which has its own purpose in other contexts, for example, as the foundation for colour composition: in the classical, layered indirect painting described in Cennino Cennini‘s (circa 1370–1440) book Il Libro dell’Arte (The Book of Art, early 1400s), the shades of the initial layers are systematically chosen to enhance the glow of the subsequent layers of colour, for example, by using complementary colours. A rare Merenmies painting showing signs of this systematic approach is the large The Fire of Love (1995–2019), which is based on the contrast between the olive-green terrain and the rust-red branches and fiery hairlines crisscrossing it. The difference in the darkness of the hairlines and the olive-green terrain is so slight that they merge into a single bundle. Such a colour contrast is known as simultaneous contrast, and it has the ability to create vibrating, even hallucinatory impressions where the colours meet.
Merenmies’ large new underpainted works do not appear in the least technical; instead, they convey a trusting acceptance of the absolute initial uncertainty. In their presence, I feel a spontaneous concern for the artist: how on earth can a finished painting emerge from that? How can it ever clarify and strengthen from such obscurity? I am not, like the professor from Prague, sending Elina Merenmies for a year of plaster-cast drawing refresher courses, but the professor within me wonders how such significant changes between painting layers affect the colour palette of the works? Will not all colours inevitably become muted?
Faces as backgrounds for events
In Merenmies’ art, faces melting into landscape-like areas remind me of the masks and human faces painted by the Belgian artist James Ensor, displayed in a retrospective exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in the autumn of 2009. Like Ensor, Merenmies paints faces as image-like elements within the image. In Ensor’s paintings, faces are everything, yet they look like the artist had deliberately emptied them of meaning. Similarly, anything can happen to human faces in Merenmies’ drawings, and facial features are not untouched or entitled to a special position amidst all other visible things. On the contrary, they have almost been destroyed, so the eyes and mouth would not dominate the image with their uniqueness.
Secondly, the landscape-like faces in Merenmies’ drawings are reminiscent of the heads in Surrealist paintings, from whose depths anything can be found, as from a cupboard or a nest inhabited by animals. Merenmies’ themes converge in René Magritte’s painting The Forest (1927): a modified human head with its face, and a forest. The head is a sculpture on a pedestal, and its surface is as if embroidered or inlaid with an image of a tree and its branches. Numerous examples of a similar use of the human head can be found in Merenmies’ paintings, and especially in her drawings. She uses the human face as a kind of matrix into which this and that can be placed, but not just any old thing; rather, symbols that on the one hand reflect the spiritual life happening inside the human head, and attributes comparable to the auras in theosophy cast in from the outside and above, on the other. The auras hovering above and around people inspired early abstractionists, while in Merenmies’ work, their counterparts are positioned in front of the human faces, covering these personal features from view. Instead of everything showing, nothing is visible.
The drawings Descendant of the Kings (2013) and an untitled drawing from 2023 are examples of the extremes of Merenmies’ drawings. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to her paper-based works made with ink as drawings. Descendant of the Kings appears based on a photograph, whereas the untitled drawing (2023) seems to be made without a model or photograph. It is like a visual threshold value or the minimum amount of information for symbolising a face. The ink brush strokes do not even attempt to imitate the shapes of the head and face; instead, they have been drawn as is, as straight and rough surface texture like frottage or trowel marks, over equally coarse impressions suggesting a mouth and eyes. The drawing evokes the works of Henri Michaux (1899–1984), in which brushstrokes come to life.
The model in the drawing Descendant of the Kings appears in a pose typical of a private photograph. What is fascinating about this drawing is the model’s expression, directed simultaneously into the distance and inwards; it is as if they are looking straight into the artist’s soul, despite the head being turned and the gaze directed elsewhere. However, the gaze could just as well be directed at a third person, past the artist. From certain signals, I think I perceive a nostalgic time gap in the image. Old family album photos are often used as source material in contemporary painting. They have successfully been employed by modern artists from Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) to Kaarlo Stauffer (b. 1988).
The majority of Merenmies’ drawings of faces seem to be created from memory, without a model or photograph, although the artist has mentioned occasionally using photographs and recognising the advantages, even truthfulness of this. Sometimes, the subject changes gender when transitioning from photograph to drawing. Artworks that fall between the extremes in terms of method are relaxed. A vast number of them have been created over many years. In these drawings typically made in ink, the faces are oriented frontally, directly facing the viewer, and are cropped so tightly that nothing else fits within the picture plane. A third person cannot be imagined in the depicted situation; instead, the viewer and the subject representing the artist are, in an absolute sense, together just the two of them.
Sometimes, visual obstructions have been positioned in front of the faces: hair that behaves like brushstrokes and merges with them to cover the face; clouds of dots in front of the face evoke thoughts of psychedelia or elementary particles of powdered colour pigment. Occasionally, a strange transformation occurs in the face or head, as in the drawing Isokorva (Big Ears, 2023), but the most common type of metamorphosis is that facial features are blurred unrecognisable through painting techniques. The brushwork eradicates individual features. This transformation is akin to the abstraction in modern art, whereby through squinting the eyes and simplifying the subject, details are made to disappear and the whole as a visual form is revealed. This method was long applied in live model drawing instruction, where the eyes of live models were first eliminated. Pupils are extremely rare in Merenmies’ portraits.
Division into landscapes and skies
The landscape in which Elina Merenmies’ paintings take place is divided into two: a bright sky above and a dim earth below. The compositional structure resembles Henri Rousseau’s works both in terms of line composition and colour organisation. In Rousseau’s paintings, a repeated motif is a landscape where elements on the ground, such as trees, appear silhouetted against the light, with a warm turquoise sky peeking through above and between the upper branches. Silhouetting means that colours do not stand out from each other, but appear as a unified dark mass, because the light source is behind the object. Clouds are often Naples yellow in both artists’ works. (Naples yellow is a light yellow shade referred to as “Manor House Yellow” in paint-factory colour charts.) The colour palette is reminiscent of a warm-toned variation of Hugo Simberg’s lake landscape in the painting Kevätilta jäänlähdön aikaan (Spring Evening, Ice Break, 1896).
In Finland, this kind of split is indeed visible in landscapes in the spring, when the ice melts. On the horizon, a brighter colour palette appears than on the ground, but the earthly palette is also vivid and clear. This phenomenon is not directly related to the melting of ice, but rather to specific weather conditions characteristic of a certain time of year in the annual cycle. A meteorological expert might explain the scientific cause-and-effect relationship between the colour spectrum of spring sunsets and the thawing of the ice. I have admired this phenomenon of two simultaneous colour spectrums on the island of Åvensor in the Turku archipelago, where blooming primroses stand out as a carpet of nickel titanium yellow in the twilight, appearing as if another reality against the backdrop of a wildly coloured maritime sunset.
In paintings by Simberg, Rousseau, and Merenmies, a backlit forest appears deep and lush, maintaining its intense colouristic character despite the apparent illusion or obstacle of backlight. Within the depths of the forest lies another reality that not even backlight can nullify. Light does not distribute itself evenly across the surfaces of all objects in a natural or impressionistic manner. The colour of light does not penetrate individual elements uniformly, but instead, the painting is divided into two categorically opposing areas: light and dark.
Merenmies’ forests
Forests are often depicted in Merenmies’ paintings and drawings. Based on the kinds of trees, their geographical origin is not in Finland or anywhere else in the coniferous, Northern boreal forests. The paintings feature deciduous trees, whose crowns create a particular spatial structure and affect the characteristic lighting of the forests. The crowns of the trees form a kind of a suspended ceiling in the landscape. Deciduous trees’ branches interweave laterally with each other in a way that makes them appear animate, even in reality. Unlike in coniferous forests, the upright direction of growth of the trunks does not dominate the view, but instead, the branches reach out in all directions, creating a network that uniformly covers the space. When Merenmies again and again returns to deciduous trees’ branches as a visual topic, her manner of stylising them creates the impression of a conscious animation of the trees, but also of a certain spatial archetype.
Beneath the treetops, everything is in shadow, and no figure or object receives the side light that emphasises the sculptural form and that serves as the foundation of the beauty ideal created by ancient Greek sculptures. This beauty ideal has formed the background for students at European art academies starting their studies by drawing from the model of plaster casts of ancient sculptures or their parts. Typically, art students are not told anything about the origin of the sculptures given as models, as if their aesthetic values were so eternal even as plaster reproductions as to make explanations unnecessary.
The professor at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts who criticised the young Merenmies for her maturing individual approach to spatial composition prescribed her the artificial remedy of spending an entire academic year “drawing plaster” – that is, copying ancient sculptures’ plaster reproductions with charcoal. The situation was resolved, but what is interesting is the collision itself, not the institutional outcome of the process. Generally speaking, engaging in so-called plaster cast drawing, or honing the visual representation of solid forms through shading, is not harmful to anyone, but by the fourth year of study, shading volumes comes too late.
In Merenmies’ paintings, the dim light is archetypal. It is an absurd thought experiment to imagine a teaching method that would correspond to this spatial structure as a counterpart to plaster cast drawing. The closest equivalent might be certain methods in instructing colour painting, where natural light or, in some extreme exercises, even painting in the dark is favoured. As it happens, these methods have been applied in the past particularly at the Free Art School, where Elina Merenmies works as the headmaster. Separating outlines and line composition from colour composition, the instruction at the Free Art School aims for the independence of colour thinking and the impact of colour, which is difficult to achieve if drawing and colouring simultaneously, as colour and form compete with each other. Regardless of whether the goal is or is not colourism, Elina Merenmies’ colour thinking does not separate itself from line composition, and its objectives are narrative.
The division into a dark lower part and a warm turquoise sky occurs also in those Merenmies’ paintings in which the subject matter is not the forest that explains the divided lighting. For example, in the painting Closer, in progress from 1995 to 2016, the action is concentrated in the dark lower part. The eye must become adapted before the subject, a swarm of bees, can be distinguished. This hidden pictorial structure pervading her work clearly holds significance for Merenmies. In some works, such as A Life Spent in the Dark, Hidden(2022), it is concretely combined with the narrative topic of the painting. In this painting, the figures hide behind a curtain of sharp, pointed, autumn-coloured leaves seen also in Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s painting Joukahaisen kosto (Joukahainen’s Revenge, 1897). The shivering shapes of the leaves create their own visual field, which must be observed for some time before the forms of the figures hiding in the darkness emerge from beneath the leafy veil. This theme, the sacred concealed in darkness, recurs throughout Merenmies’ art.
Merenmies’ trees
Elina Merenmies’ deciduous trees intertwining in the twilight offer yet another reason to refer to Henri Rousseau. Rousseau’s trees were not typical of his native France either; he drew and painted exotic tree species in the Jardin des Plantes, the Botanical Garden of Paris. There grows, for instance, an immense cedar of Lebanon reportedly planted by the writer and diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848).
Elina Merenmies’ trees do not represent Finnish species of trees, but unlike in Henri Rousseau’s paintings, the choice of species does not appear as an expression of longing for exoticism. Rather, Merenmies seems to long for her familiar Central Europe, just as Rousseau longs for the unfamiliar tropics. The structure of the deciduous trees, the arrangement of their trunks and branches, and their internal proportions are better suited to Merenmies’ compositional goals than the straight trunks of pine or spruce with their sparse masses of needles.
Regardless of the symbolic meanings of trees, they can be viewed as a painting or drawing task. Drawing trees is difficult, one of the most challenging tasks for an artist. As a child, I wondered why the artist and professor Onni Oja (1909–2004) dedicated an entire chapter to drawing them in his textbook Piirtämisen taito(The Skill of Drawing, 1957), but I no longer wonder, having finally this winter dared to attempt drawing trees for the first time in my life. Immersing myself in this writing task was not the reason for this, for me, atypical choice of subject, but as I drew trees, I felt close to Elina Merenmies’ world. In February, as I added for the first time a branch to the cylindrical trunk of a birch tree, I felt the same dizziness and joy of daring as if I were leaping off a diving platform.
Why is drawing and painting trees difficult? The overall shape of trees is almost always too large to fit on drawing paper. The problem is that the characteristic essence of a tree is only properly revealed when the tree is depicted in its entirety. A naturalistic piece of spruce from the middle of the trunk tells nothing about the spruce tree. On the other hand, it is not even worthwhile trying to fit a whole tree onto a piece of paper or a canvas. Dimensionally, paper is usually an A4-type rectangle, in which the ratio of height to width is different from the ratio of a tree’s height to the width of its canopy. When depicting trees, the artist must develop a permanent compromise where the internal proportions of the tree, such as the differences in size between branches and the trunk, have been radically modified, without the viewer losing the sense of this here being a tree.
Elina Merenmies solved this compositional problem long ago by allowing the trunks of the trees in her paintings to spread thicker than they are in nature relative to the branches, while simultaneously narrowing and shortening the branches so that in their new, reduced form, they fit in the image in their entirety. Ending branches mid-air is a trick in itself. In Merenmies’ paintings, they taper and disappear smoothly, fading and bending gracefully into the void like the supple arms of a ballerina, without allowing the joints to constrain the undulating movement. The method of anarchically modifying the proportions of a tree could be compared to compositional application of the proportions of the human body, so that the limbs would be truncated, made thinner and shorter than they should be in proportion to the torso, if the intention is to make the torso fill the picture plane more and appear more monumental. As a visual topic, the human body is somewhat analogous to a tree, but with trees, the problem of height is more dramatic.
In a way, Merenmies does just as Onni Oja advises: she stylises species of trees into idealised forms and includes only as much foliage as necessary for the trees to be recognisable. When thus stylised, leafless deciduous trees develop into signs or pictographs, from which the viewer recognises the tree as a tree without demanding individualistic naturalistic features of it. They are irrelevant for Merenmies’ goals. This approach is characteristic of illustration, which is a central point of comparison for narrative contemporary art, and quite unnecessarily taboo within art criticism.
Another difficulty in drawing and painting trees is related to their fractally-repeated branch-and-leaf formulae. This characteristic of endless detail is also recognised by drawing enthusiasts. Novice drawers may assume that the difficulty of depicting trees stems from the abundance of leaves, but rather, it arises from the multilayered repetition of form that eludes the scale of the human hand. Once one manages somehow to simplify and capture the rhythm of the branches, the eye alternates between focusing on and getting lost in ever smaller and smaller details. There seems to be no end to the layering and visual information, and understanding the relationships between the components of trees is further complicated by the fact that the forms repeat at increasingly smaller scales, yet are similar. Mathematician Benôit Mandelbrot (1924–2010) and the cauliflower, often used to illustrate fractals, come to mind.
Elina Merenmies succeeds in portraying the fractal structure of trees in her paintings as a rough general principle without enslaving herself to its exact replication. Merenmies has adopted the hairline as her basic unit of fractality, which, when slightly enlarged, symbolises the smallest branches of the trees, which, when slightly thicker still, are in turn analogous to the protrusions of the root system. Everything has the same form, only differing in size. At some point, the roles of the roots and canopies begin to mix. In the painting Ascete (2017), it appears as if an entire group of trees or a copse stands with its roots sticking in the air, swaying.
In the proverb, human mobility is justified by the fact that we have legs and not roots. Mobility symbolises diversity in human life. In the painting Another Kind of Tree (2022), six trees stand in a row, with a seventh, red and different, positioned asymmetrically between the second and third. The deviant tree’s colour appears luminous, and its protrusions, instead of branches, resemble roots or a bunch of the graphic symbols of electric shock. The different tree has turned upside down and set in motion.
The small tempera and oil painting Everything Shows (2023) has given the exhibition at the Turku Art Museum its name. This time, the branches of the deciduous trees extend upwards and do not intersect to form a canopy that would separate the sky from the forest. The colour palette remains warm, reminiscent of Central European forests and Rousseau’s paintings.
In the centre, a dotted figure hovers directly down from the sky, with blood-red roots in place of feet. The roots, in their colour, resemble a circulatory system of blood vessels. Behind it, the sun is obscured, its light creating a regular, geometric corona. Such corona effects of light are typical in forests. The figure does not actually even float, but seems to be either lowering itself or even falling freely from the sky, almost as if suspended from the heights by its root-like feet. The position reminds one of the Apostle Peter, crucified upside down.
Merenmies’ lines
Networks resembling mycelium or blood vessels are the predominant, all-encompassing motif in Merenmies’s paintings. Simultaneously, they serve as the fundamental element of her drawings. In the paintings, the fine lines form the surface texture, while in the drawings, they constitute the pervasive structure of the whole. These lines have a dual meaning: on one hand, they can be seen as the ink’s intrinsic or uncontrolled way of spreading across the paper in delicate streams – a natural force that the artist cannot control. In this interpretation, the trees of the paintings with their branches are chosen to serve the form dictated by spreading ink. On the other hand, the spreading fine lines in the drawings can be approached from the opposite direction, as the smallest and final fractal stage of trees, branches, and twigs, intended to repeat the motif of the trees in an abstract form, as unorganised material.
Juha-Heikki Tihinen notes the same issue, using different words:
“Blood vessels, tree branches, hairs, and lines are one of Merenmies’ subjects of interest, in which the simultaneous significance of both the surface and the choice of topic is highlighted. Recently, in many of her paper-based works, she has utilised the simultaneously expressive and decorative power of different kinds of lines, as the lines in the drawing both create a two-dimensional impression, and invite the viewer to examine the artist’s handiwork more closely.” (Tihinen 2012, 12.)
Merenmies’ dots
The filigree-like patterning of dots in Merenmies’ paintings evokes Aboriginal art, which was featured in the major exhibition Magiciens de la Terre in Paris in 1989. This was the same year Merenmies began her studies in Brussels. The exhibition was marketed as the first attempt to present contemporary art from a global perspective. The shift in thinking was significant. Just five years earlier, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had in the exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art presented global art as an inspiration for Western modern art, in a way that today feels colonialist, but which with its concrete artwork examples was one of the first authoritative attempts to do justice to African and Oceanic art.
Both exhibitions were groundbreaking reinterpretations of modern art history, but Magiciens de la Terre also influenced the visual language of contemporary artists of its time, thereby expanding our awareness. One of the visual impulses in contemporary art inspired by the exhibition was precisely the magical dot patterns of Aboriginal art. Within international contemporary art, these patterns found their way into the paintings of, for example, Chris Ofili (b. 1968). What is essential is not whether Merenmies had seen the exhibition, but the parallelism of there being elementary units, present both in her art and in Aboriginal art, smaller in scale than the human hand and invoking thoughts of supernatural forces. Magiciens de la Terre legitimised this universally human trait in global art, colonised for centuries, and it soon emerged in Western contemporary art with full force. It was no longer a question of applying primitive models as material for something supposedly more cultivated, but about sharing a universal visual symbol. Perhaps the most beautiful message of an exhibition aspiring to globality was manifested precisely in the motifs adopted directly and indirectly by numerous artists.
Ultimately, it is indeed about the history of influences. The Magiciens de la Terre of Paris and the Gent exhibition Open Mind, both from 1989, spread through the ether and, as generational experiences, fertilised also the works of artists who had not seen the exhibitions in question. Elina Merenmies belongs to a generation who began their independent life around the time of these exhibitions. Their liberating message reached her across the skies, like the particles settling on human faces in her paintings, and supported her in becoming the artist she is today.
Bibliography
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