On an idea level Nu Painting is not innovative or news-worthy. Artist groups like Poster Company and PaintFx have exhausted the novelty of the gesture. The pseudoawkward abstract digital painting that reflects on its own failure to simulate (/ is nostalgic and knowing in its failure) has been introduced as a possible move years ago and has led to a dead end. To continue executing this move might be questionable and unoriginal.

I’m interested in how this treaded practice could be linked to a biography. It doesn’t make sense with the other work that I’m doing. There are several artists inhabiting the same biological person. One of the artists wants to be a careless/carefree bro that produces desireable objects for fairs. Some of the other artists would oppose. I toggle between several playing styles. Sometimes I’m a moralist. Then I drop my Samsung Galaxy S4 into a toilet at the club and wish I had more resources and more fun.

Lately I’ve been trying to judge less and observe more. In the best cases making is a form of observation. Making the Nu Paintings feels very internal, it’s close to me. I was bed-ridden when I started. I was afraid of death and craved gloss and color. Screen-glow at 4 am.

From the outside the paintings look like a calculated move, an unthinking and unfeeling one. How to match the internal to the external? How to be genuine and to also be understood as that? It feels good to be late to the game and to be a plagiarist. It feels good when people come to a show and express disappointment, if only in body language. They expected more of me. In their minds I had potential.

There are three blocks of ice cream in the vitrine. Synthetic dreadlocks in bright colors support the melting blobs. This matches the viewers’ sense of deflation. I feel free, the radar is off me again. I’m not a critical thinker. I’m not a “good artist”. 

I started writing about how I want to explore physical materials colliding with the virtual, what happens to a file when it’s printed and exhibited in the gallery space, but I’m not actually interested in that at all, not in those bla bla bla terms. I want to make objects that are compelling. It hardly matters how I get there. I want things that have aura, prints that are beings. I want to: Get money / fuck bitches.

Post Internet (or whatever the label would be) is not interesting on a conceptual level. Documents being manipulated and distributed, circulation is hardly a concept, to point that out is not new. What’s interesting is the shady, flimsy part: visual tropes that travel as memes. The mimicry, the ripping off, the style, in the knowing-who-you-are-and-not-giving-a-damn sense. Or maybe it’s not-knowing-who-you-are-and-being-desperate-to-please, that’s interesting too. It’s about data organized in a satisfying manner. I think Beckett said something about beauty being all in the form, probably a lot of people said that. Things that look good are good. All images have the same value.

People talk about branding, their brands, their brand strategies, and I agree, that is interesting, but then I also think that I don’t want to be a brand like an emerging fashion label would, the interesting ones are Ikea or H&M or something, brands that morph and self-contradict, umbrella brands that hold entire imitation worlds. Ikea looks at us like an alien would, then it churns out set designs that we live out of. Ikea is surprisingly critical.

www.nupainting.com

We’re building a Finnish pavilion in Finland in an attempt to save Finnish art from itself. It’s a depressed art which needs to be monitored against self-harm. Depression is anger turned inwards.

We’re like: LOL at your national interests. We’ve been left exhausted by the notion of art as a social good and a cultural export. Take the knife, remember to cut along the vein, not across. We’re writing in English since we never felt quite at home with you. Our audience might as well be in Middle Earth.

We are for the deprofessionalization of art. We’re here to tell you that master’s programs no longer lead to higher knowledge (if they ever did). Playing by other people’s rules will get you nowhere. Nice guys finish last. Good girls get 3 year working grants, bad girls get whatever they want.

As the nation exports itself it points towards the trees, conveniently mystified by nature and really into the forest as a suitably neutral common ground. 95 percent of Finnish forests are farms for the paper industry. We grew up in the suburbs and found out for ourselves what the rest of the Western cultural sphere already knows: the Internet is truly sublime and there is little to no reason to go outside and play. We don’t want those still lake surfaces, feelings of inner calm to match the external. We couldn’t care less what the willows whisper.

We want more intensity, more income disparity, more perfume baths and endless club nights. More strobe lights that cause epileptic seizures.

The 20’s are coming around again and we’re snorting speed with Waltari (both band and author). We’re on the next high speed train to Paris. The windows are open to Europe and what we want to jump out with is not a reasonably well thought out self-excoticized MFA project about the environment but the flat and sharp-cornered truth regarding how unreasonable we really were.

#suomenpaviljonki #venice2013 #boredom #welfare #opinions