GALLERY ASKI: PANU RUOTSALO – IMPRESSIONS FROM NIGHT TO DAWN

“In my upcoming exhibition, I reflect on my childhood in 1970s Aulanko, in Hämeenlinna, and revisit the dark hours before the break of dawn. As a preschool child, I spent a great deal of time alone, and it was then that I began to train my imagination and to make use of it whenever I could, and whenever it felt necessary. The exhibition at Galleria Aski presents paintings inspired by these moments.

I was six years old when I sat on the stairs leading to the upper floor of our house and watched through the window as the taillights of a Volvo 164 disappeared into the winter forest, leaving behind only the familiar darkness. Then began a daily recurring moment that lasted until the sun, with determination, traced its way through the forest, into the weathered walls and windows of the cottage, and from there into the eyes of a child who sustained himself with imagination and patiently waited for the light.

In winter, the house was cold in the mornings. It was heated mainly with firewood, as the heater that produced a lung-searing stench of oil had been abandoned due to its considerable health and fire hazards. Running water was not always available, sometimes not for months at a time, because the pump or the pipes had frozen and often remained so until March. During those moments, I usually sat in my safe place on the sofa beside the fireplace, wrapped in coarse, itchy inherited blankets, and glanced timidly toward the windows, the way a child looks slightly past something too frightening to face directly. I saw how the snow-covered forms of pines and spruces created figures in the moonlight against the dark sky. They took on many shapes and many faces—often familiar, but sometimes prone to twisting themselves into new, ever more terrifying forms that, through a child’s boundless imagination, ruled over this place abandoned by all powers for the winter. Only when the morning light drew its delicate Prussian-blue lines across the snow did I dare to rise and look straight through the old windowpanes—panes that distorted the landscape and were frozen along their lower edges—and examine what I saw.

The branches of the rose bushes, weighed down by snow, looked as if a hundred small beings had bowed in humility before some invisible power. The large stone in the upper yard appeared, beneath its snowy burden, like a massive sleeping bull, and the brick-built grill (which, even now, when I think of it, fills my mouth with the intoxicating taste of char-grilled Baltic herring) looked, under its thick cloak of snow, like an inviting black entrance to subterranean worlds. In the forest, just a stone’s throw from the house, a gigantic spruce rose high above everything else. Its crown swayed in slow movements and, in the moonlight, resembled a distant, mythical mountain from fairy-tale books. It was an old tree, much older than the house, I remember thinking.”

Panu Ruotsalo is known for exploring different ways and techniques of painting, and he is known for his abstract expressionism, which is in a constantly changing state, constantly searching for new ways of presentation and nuances. He often ties exhibition ensembles into a story by writing text to support the paintings and using even familiar subjects as metaphors, guiding the viewer into a deeper experience with his paintings.

Welcome to the opening on Thursday, February 12, from 5 to 7 PM!

An artist talk will take place on Sunday, March 1, from 3 to 4 PM. Welcome!

Website: Panu Ruotsalo

instagram: @panuruotsalo