Text by Frida Cornell — MARI RANTANEN

There are numerous names and theoretical categories that could encapsulate Mari Rantanen’s painting. She is a child of modernism, as well as being a postmodernist and a feminist – of course! A colourist and concretist. She holds nothing back, while, at the same time keeping strictly to the basic template for her work. It is clear that this is an artist who inhabits a universe of opposites, a universe with a highly charged centre that offers viewers multiple layers of understanding and seeing.

But no wonder. After studying at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in the 1970s, and spending a little over a decade living in the New York of the vibrant 1980s, her language developed to incorporate not just modernism, with its roots in the work of artists, such as Malevich and Mondrian and on to the later Swedish concretist Olle Baertling, but also the postmodern movement, with such widely disparate impulses as minimalism (at the interface between modernism and postmodernism), pop art and situationism.

In her earlier groups of works (Shop til you drop, Neighborly love, Close and others) Rantanen used and reworked various types of maps. These could be plan drawings of apartments, shopping centres, building façades or subway systems, which she has integrated into her paintings like raster screens. Just as Baertling’s geometric paintings and sculptures criss-crossed by lines can be seen as reflecting the rationalist’s fascination with the engineering advances of his day, I believe that in these paintings Rantanen is hankering after a formal arrangement of space from an urban perspective. This architectonic aspect of the paintings provides a tonic chord for the whole of Rantanen’s oeuvre. But, where Baertling and the modernists strove to achieve a form of metaphysical being, purified of the degeneracy of the everyday, and devoid of external relationships or interventions, Rantanen confidently mingles influences and associations. She wants to investigate seeing, to dissolve the boundaries between inside and outside. As Beatriz Colomina shows, in her classic, Privacy and Publicity, Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1999), the locus of the inception of architecture has now shifted into a mediatized landscape, where subject and object change places:

“Architecture is not simply a platform that accommodates the viewing

subject. It is a viewing mechanism that produces the subject. It precedes and frames its occupant.” (Colomina 1999, 242-243.)

I see Rantanen as using the framing function of architecture in her paintings in the same way – to challenge the viewer’s position and to enmesh us in the various layers of the paintings, the moment we begin to look.

But, in so doing, she leaves formal concerns behind and reveals her delight

in the city as a system of infinite possibilities. She embarks on what is very much her own dérive, to use Guy Debord’s term, and is not at the mercy of chance in the romantic manner, but creates her own voyages of discovery on the canvas, where we are invited to join her.

The city, with its possible and impossible throughways, is of major importance for Rantanen, it constitutes a central space and source of inspiration. She tells me, when the topic arises, that the many journeys she has made and places she has visited have influenced her in a way that affects her artistic work. It leaves clear traces in her paintings. On a studio stay in Rome in autumn 2011, she was particularly industrious. The hot, heavy light of the city affected the way she painted. Back at home in Sweden, she saw shifts of tone in the paintings, which did not function as she had thought; the light of the North was too cool, too white. She had to paint over and rework several of them. This shows how strongly the place prompts both thought and action for her.

The light and the handling of the paint are, at times, almost overwhelming in their capacity to confront the viewer, but just when you are on the point of throwing in the towel, you are caught up by the rhythm of the patterns – you are inside. And there is something about the way that Rantanen approaches complex pattern constructions, in combination with scale and dimensions, that prompts me to think of music. She composes her works like musical scores, in the same way as musicians like Terry Riley or Steve Reich, with recurrent phrases slowly taking shape, dissolving and then being repeated. There is a rhythmic energy here that constantly drives us on and we can surely detect a fondness for the mysteries of mathematics in Ranatenen’s work. But, in contrast to the minimalists, she does not shun illusion or emotion. On the contrary. In her use of decorative and oriental patterns, which curl and meander out from among the bright colours, she reveals a powerful passion for her own medium, doubtless with the aim of challenging the viewer’s notions of space and form, but without losing herself in some idea about the essence of the work. These patterns also reveal an unexpectedly light, deft touch. If anything, I see a link between the paintings and a Baroque fugue, in which the subject is counterpointed by a second, third or fourth voice, and these are then reprised in different variations, echoing each other as in the works of Bach.

In her latest group of portraits, Portrait Gallery, some of them painted in Rome, Rantanen returns to the oval, albeit in a larger format than before. She has previously used this form of portrait to depict African authors. This time, she shows the women who have meant a great deal to her in her life. The titles guide us, with each painting containing the initial letter of the subject’s first name, as a thread for us to follow, or even as a mooring rope: Maria, My, Saida, Agnes, Bridget... A total of 14 paintings that together form one big women’s collective. And this is also typical of Rantanen. Each painting is a distinct individual, but together they create something else,

with the strength of the group concentrating the experience. Leena, Maria, and Magdalena are there, all of them friends, but also evoking associations with Christian saints. Others point to sources of inspiration. Agnes, as in Agnes Martin (1912-2004), the minimalist who called herself an abstract expressionist because the origins of her art lay in feelings and intuition, not unlike Rantanen’s. Or Bridget, as in Bridget Riley (1931-), a connecting link between the two. Mother and daughter are there – the origin – and likewise My, Little My in the Moomin Valley books by the Finnish author Tove Jansson. This strong, angry, independent, yet loyal figure fights and goes her own way, and somehow becomes synonymous with Rantanen herself. On the other hand, they are all building blocks of Rantanen’s universe. They become a feminist statement, giving prominence to these women, reading them through the paintings, singly and together. Another series of paintings has been given the name Gabriella, and here we see the archangel as a woman, her wings mirroring themselves kaleidoscopically in each other, God’s messenger.

Not unexpectedly, Rantanen says that she has drawn her inspiration from icons, which takes our thoughts to female saints and decorative elements. But there is very little that is religious about Rantanen’s painting. That is not to say that they do not contain a certain measure of spirituality or faith. I spontaneously find myself thinking about the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). A trailblazing artist within abstract painting. She portended several of the great modernists, even if she never personally came in contact with them. She considered herself a medium, guided by a spiritual dimension, and in her systematic painting she interpreted various currents in philosophy and theosophy. But where Hilma af Klint’s painting is tied to the mystery of existence, Rantanen follows her own belief in humanity and in the possibilities of painting. And she communicates her message skilfully, like a true Gabriella. I look around me, to the artists of my generations who have had Rantanen as a teacher – Jacob Dahlgren with his stripes and fondness for the concrete, or Anna Svensson’s symbol-laden systematizations and large, colourful works, to name but a few. They handle colour with the same self- evident fearlessness, starting off, developing, repeating, and going far and wide, onwards. And it is obvious that we are far from the cool, Nordic grey scale here.

Frida Cornell

Published in “Mari Rantanen Portraits and Paintings” by Korjaamo galleria 2012