I am a visual artist living and working in Tampere. My work mainly consists of drawings and paintings on canvas, some of which incorporate text. I work in charcoal, acrylics, and oil paint. I draw and paint what I see and think, smell and taste, hear and feel. The world which is filled with sense and absurdity, beauty and ugliness, love and hate, stupidity and wisdom, is an endless source of inspiration for an artist in whose works humans and their actions are always an integral component.

The idea and meaning behind an art work are paramount to me - methods and techniques are usually secondary. However, I enjoy making and want to make highly visual images. There is a small but extremely fruitful contradiction in this and my ideas and figures often take me along winding roads before their essence and story unravel themselves to me. The process is not always easy. Sometimes the end result strays far from the original idea. Focusing on the meaning and message will overcome the visual elements; whereas emphasizing the latter will complicate interpretation. When I look back on my works, I see that I move in the middle ground between ideas and visual representation, at times slanting towards one or the other.

In Gallery Uusitalo I am presenting works from years 2007-09. Recently, I have studied the concepts of movement, time and seriality. I have approached these subject matters, for example, in works that consist of several parts. The range of possible content makes the multi-part form intriguing to me. Traditionally, a painter uses one canvas to communicate everything that is essential, to capture the quintessential moment. A sequence of pictures can be used to question and challenge this form, also important is the way (and direction) in which the hung sequence should be read. I continue to work on two series of paintings Men Talk About Their Feelings and 99 Bad Jokes on Canvas. The first is based on the repetition of a single image; two characters are communicating with each other using different signs and symbols encapsulated in word balloons. The facial expressions of the characters are serious, but the messages in the balloons can be interprated in several ways. The latter series, 99 Bad Jokes... is an installation which will consist of 99 canvases in its final form. The individual works of the series only have numbers as names which gives them a strong definition. Regardless of what the work is about, it is always a bad joke. This theme offers many possibilities to create tensions in the works. The texts in all of my works are written in English to facilitate showing abroad.

Anne Paldanius´ text "Between the Lines" as an appendix.

Tampere 18.2.2009
Tuomo Rosenlund

"Between The Lines"

The recent paintings by Tuomo Rosenlund, artist from Tampere, are not manifestos of world events or documentaries of the artist’s own life. In fact, they no longer have much to do with fictive story telling or expressive introspection. The change in content matter coincided with the change in the working method. In his 2005 paintings Rosenlund still combined drawing and painting in the same image plane – giving drawing a task of structural design, while letting painting bring life and drama into the images.

Drawing is still strongly present in Tuomo Rosenlund’s pictorial language, yet now in a different way: instead of acting as a backbone for the composition it now resembles a symbolic element, an antithesis of the freely roaming colour, which claims plenty of space in Rosenlund´s new images and take his style in a more painterly direction. A new kind of visual play is brought to the paintings by the dramatic encounter between black and white drawing and areas of expressive brushstrokes on the canvas.

Rosenlund’s mid-decade paintings still had a strong existential undercurrent, which was apparent in the way his male characters were presented in the pictures. Placid and expressionless they posed in various situations and did not reveal anything of their feelings or thoughts. The viewers were left to interpret the situations according to their own perceptions of them. The paintings from Men talk about their Feelings series (2008) seem to follow the same mode of expression, but a closer look will reveal their more multi-layered content.

It is a deeply rooted belief that Finnish men do not talk about their feelings. Rosenlund’s assumption that they do, contradicts this persistent cliché of our culture. From a woman’s point of view the thought is alluring – will Tuomo Rosenlund give women a chance to peek into the depths of the male mind and discover something that will reveal the mystery of manhood? The enigma, however, will remain unresolved, since the paintings do not analyze manhood at all, but instead aim at revealing the process of
human communication in general. Interestingly, Rosenlund, who often added texts to his paintings, now does not give us such an easy route into the minds of his characters: instead of text as a means of communication, he uses pictorial symbols which carry a variety of content. This time it is not possible to resort to mere intuitive perception in order to interpret the images – Rosenlund challenges his viewers to participate in a semiotic game, where the meanings are revealed only after careful content analysis.  

Very often Rosenlund finds himself struggling in a “fruitful contradiction” between idea and visual representation. One of the manifestations of this struggle is a series of paintings 99 Bad Jokes on Canvas (2007), in which Rosenlund emphasizes the readability of a single painting and the thematic unity of the whole series. Also, in other recent works of his, such as in My Next Painting (2008) comprising four paintings, there is more conceptual play between language and image than before, as well as an analysis of time and continuity by means of serial painting.

The age-old artistic dispute over the juxtaposition of drawing and painting has been given a refreshing solution in Rosenlund’s Phenomena series (2007): the artist allows two separate worlds to glide over each other without letting them mix. This encounter is not always gentle and sometimes areas of paint seem to attract drawing with violence. In his three cartoon-like paintings Jolly Ride (Come with Us)  (2008) Rosenlund surprises his vacant-looking characters strolling in urban scenery with a burst of colour which speeds past like a colourful metro train, leaving people perplexed and wondering what they have just seen. It may very well be that Tuomo Rosenlund’s paintings will have the same effect on their audience.  

Text and translation: Anne Paldanius