i. invocation

Mari Rantanens paintings have an immediate luminosity. Being constructed by panels that are contrasted to one another gives them a cinematic strain. One is carried from one scene to another.
 Her paintings are saturated by enticing presentiments and sensations. The most evident character of the paintings is color with its inherent, attendant light. The evoked expression is strongly emotional. This color both arouses and holds conflicting emotions roomed together. The disparate parts of the paintings come together because of differences that are mutually necessary. And the greater these are the greater the sense of depth evoked. Overflowing with possibilities the painting of Rantanen is rich and inviting for the beholder. Not only in the over-all form but even down to the specific particularities. Every brushstroke is visible. Through the saturated washes glimpses of a time imbued in the paintings are made visible. With the sheer eye one experiences the minute difference between the watercolorly washes and the opaque surface. Therefrom one discerns that her paintings must be experienced at distance as well as close at hand. The grandly rhythmical pulsating events acts against the vibrating poetry of the detail.

ii. nearness

Presence presupposes a strong experience of the now, a blazing sense of life they really exists. The paintings of Rantanen moves from generality to singularity. Bonnard or Vuillard, two great colorists from the turn of century, knew how to create presence through color. Hues and values were driven away from naturalism, off from the common, to an exact but yet intuitive feeling of that –now, right now!… past the arbitrary and accidental sensation. Thus the color was set free to be embedded in the now, the now in which the artist, and later, the beholder dwells.
 In this way the colors, the paintings becomes incomparable. Strangely enough it is this incomparability that makes it possible for us to enter our own tunnels and echo-chambers.

iii. on grey

The paintings of Rantanen are not toned down or balanced. The are all that is contrary to the renewed nordic light; ”Nordic Light”; this greenness. Grey does not exist in her painting. With her it is silvery.

iv. concrete discourse

The formal language of Rantanen is bit by bit built up by motif-cells that are repeated, entwined, contrasted. Surfaces become space. The orchestration of entwining voices creates concrete strains of indefinable spaces and pulsating movements. But the paintings are yet much more. The add.
 She is born, raised and educated in Finland, and it is not surprising that the strong concrete tradition of Finland has been very close to her. In many ways L. G. Nordström, Matti Kujasalo, Paul Osipow are apparent references, but all the more, perhaps, the versatile Sam Vanni. With him there is a mental readiness for differences which is also Mari Rantanen´s.

v. on being European

In 1986 she went to New York for half a year. It turned out to be ten. She lived in a dense urban surrounding with not one tree in sight. Here she learned to add instead of subtracting. An artist does not necessarily have to choose among the abundance of possibilities. Any conversation has room(s) enough for many truths. As does any painting. Not until New York did she feel European. The reductionistic move in American painting did not attract her. She rather perceived the depth and tradition in European painting and culture. Within European tradition there existed a broader ideology that has never, really, met in the distinctions drawn between the abstract and the figurative, the decorative and the illusory. If her paintings evoke a here and a beyond, rooms that open inward, so it is organically connected with the cultural flows in which it moves. From the mosaics in Ravenna, Icon painting, Byzantine pictures, and, not the least, the 15th century of Siena, to the landscape of the contemporary art scene, all currents are of equal strength. Coming together in whirlpool and swirls. The art of Rantanen is replete with such powers. The culture that moves through her art is of an almost physical sensation.
 First when she had moved to New York she got herself a cottage, with a sauna at a lake, in Finland. Here she spends her summers. Event though nature does not find a place in her paintings it sneaks in, but then only through culture.

vi. fragments

Drawing, the entirety of the act, must flow through her body. A kind of choreography. A movement that also exists in the color, a question go rhythm, energy, a very personal quality then. In her paintings there exists also a kind of interstice, lacuna - a distance between form and fragment. Even the fragmentary in the pictures is a personal experience: to move to another country, speaking the language of the country without having an emotional contact with the words one articulates. The fragment is the oppositeion, but not the denial of - on the contrary rather - the totality of the physical rhythm, which is as strongly perceivable as it is inevitable.

vii. passages

Motifs that reoccur in picture after picture must be multifaceted. A motif-cell must not be unambiguous. A cross is not only a religious symbol, it is a plus sign, which in the next instance transforms to a rudimentary handpainted sign. In one of the recent paintings by Rantanen, ”Imaginary Gestures” 1997, plus signs and X’s hover over a space of crosses, connected in such subdued shades that they are barely discernible. The color and the smallest of forms melt together in a rotation, for which I can find but one suitable expression: the smile of the painting.
 In the clarkty of drawing, which is created in a movement or springs forth from encountering surfaces, contrast is the foremost of foundations. So also with Rantanen. Yet, even though the drawing may be the first of phases in the painting, she further vitalizes it by the combinations accrued within a decidedly painterly thinking and attitude. This foundation is given timbre through the qualities of color. Not merely through the contrasting of effect, but through the tensions which may best be described in the antithesis of hot and cold. The dark space of crosses in ”Imaginary Gestures” is but one example. In other paintings she pushes the heat further with brilliant fireworks that cling like droplets or rub against the glitter of silver: ”Describing the Describable, ”Common Assumption of the Ritual”, Potentially Endless Sets”, all from 1997.
 Rantanen is never tempered. An artist in a big city, where she is a stranger, must be clear to herself, and others. She may not stand estranged, confronted with her own extremes. This is an existential as well as an artistic issue.

vii. motif

Signs and forms recur - now as individuals; now as armies trod ding over the paintings. Gathered together from a multitude of founts, preferably patterns created through the many handicrafts women have, and still do, engaged themselves with. Yet, here still, they spring from the most diverse of sources. ”Everything is motion between the kitchen and the glamour,” Rantanen pointed out in an interview some years ago.
 Some recurring motifs are the crosses, the rectangle, a rhythmically flowing line, small squares, figures of patterns, etc. This is a part of the pictorial flowing line, small squares, Figures of patterns, etc. This is a part of the pictorial world, but it is preceded by Rantanens concern with the artistic and its material.Getting very close to the painting one see the delicate traces following the brush, the manifold ways she has used the colors in and of themselves. The painterly process, the skillful craftsmanship, the masterly touch of the medium enables her to use the motif-cells with great variety. One could compare it with the use of parameters in music. If a pianist, for example, variates a tone through the intensity of the touch, Rantanen variates a motif-cell by painting it, in different contexts-translucent, transparent, opaque, or with or without a structure. The emotional expression is thus transformed. In the handling of the material dwells the intuitive, emotional ground of the paintings. For certain it mirrors the artist’s own strong experience  of presence - now - as she paints. A certain parameter - for example layers of color, paint-texture, translucent surface - as used with some motif cells, receives a discernably different expression if the same parameter is applied to a different motif-cell. Just look the rhythmical rolling, almost melodically drawn arabesque, is transformed in different paintings. In the way she executes the paintings there is a musical consequence. One might rather compare the cinematic form, I mentioned beforehand, with the contrasting parts of a piece of music, which is yet profoundly intertwined through a deeply felt underlying movement. This is the riddle of the composition.

ix. repetition

Repetition can be purely riteal, a recurrent necessity. It can also be a way of evoking a certain mood. of sorrow, calm or concentration. Or, why not, a condition of beauty, a beauty that has just burst through the walls of conventional beauty in a quest for a new space. Repetitions can be as voices layered one upon the other. The forms disguising one another; mocking us through likenesses. When the underlying layers burst through it comes with a violent force. A glimpse is enough to be swept on to an entirely different world - the same, yet anew. This is the kernel of repetition.

x. on forebodings

Through the layerings we are witnesses to an event, a history, an occurrence. On one level this is the narrative trait of picture, It is about desire and devotion. But, also, it is about how rules are crossed by chaos. In the overlaying patters rifts are hinted at. Perhaps this is where the painting of Mari Rantanen begins.

Thomas Millroth

Mari Rantanens paintings have an immediate luminosity. Being constructed by panels that are contrasted to one another gives them a cinematic strain. One is carried from one scene to another.
 Her paintings are saturated by enticing presentiments and sensations. The most evident character of the paintings is color with its inherent, attendant light. The evoked expression is strongly emotional. This color both arouses and holds conflicting emotions roomed together. The disparate parts of the paintings come together because of differences that are mutually necessary. And the greater these are the greater the sense of depth evoked. Overflowing with possibilities the painting of Rantanen is rich and inviting for the beholder. Not only in the over-all form but even down to the specific particularities. Every brushstroke is visible. Through the saturated washes glimpses of a time imbued in the paintings are made visible. With the sheer eye one experiences the minute difference between the watercolorly washes and the opaque surface. Therefrom one discerns that her paintings must be experienced at distance as well as close at hand. The grandly rhythmical pulsating events acts against the vibrating poetry of the detail.

ii. nearness

Presence presupposes a strong experience of the now, a blazing sense of life they really exists. The paintings of Rantanen moves from generality to singularity. Bonnard or Vuillard, two great colorists from the turn of century, knew how to create presence through color. Hues and values were driven away from naturalism, off from the common, to an exact but yet intuitive feeling of that –now, right now!… past the arbitrary and accidental sensation. Thus the color was set free to be embedded in the now, the now in which the artist, and later, the beholder dwells.
 In this way the colors, the paintings becomes incomparable. Strangely enough it is this incomparability that makes it possible for us to enter our own tunnels and echo-chambers.

iii. on grey

The paintings of Rantanen are not toned down or balanced. The are all that is contrary to the renewed nordic light; ”Nordic Light”; this greenness. Grey does not exist in her painting. With her it is silvery.

iv. concrete discourse

The formal language of Rantanen is bit by bit built up by motif-cells that are repeated, entwined, contrasted. Surfaces become space. The orchestration of entwining voices creates concrete strains of indefinable spaces and pulsating movements. But the paintings are yet much more. The add.
 She is born, raised and educated in Finland, and it is not surprising that the strong concrete tradition of Finland has been very close to her. In many ways L. G. Nordström, Matti Kujasalo, Paul Osipow are apparent references, but all the more, perhaps, the versatile Sam Vanni. With him there is a mental readiness for differences which is also Mari Rantanen´s.

v. on being European

In 1986 she went to New York for half a year. It turned out to be ten. She lived in a dense urban surrounding with not one tree in sight. Here she learned to add instead of subtracting. An artist does not necessarily have to choose among the abundance of possibilities. Any conversation has room(s) enough for many truths. As does any painting. Not until New York did she feel European. The reductionistic move in American painting did not attract her. She rather perceived the depth and tradition in European painting and culture. Within European tradition there existed a broader ideology that has never, really, met in the distinctions drawn between the abstract and the figurative, the decorative and the illusory. If her paintings evoke a here and a beyond, rooms that open inward, so it is organically connected with the cultural flows in which it moves. From the mosaics in Ravenna, Icon painting, Byzantine pictures, and, not the least, the 15th century of Siena, to the landscape of the contemporary art scene, all currents are of equal strength. Coming together in whirlpool and swirls. The art of Rantanen is replete with such powers. The culture that moves through her art is of an almost physical sensation.
 First when she had moved to New York she got herself a cottage, with a sauna at a lake, in Finland. Here she spends her summers. Event though nature does not find a place in her paintings it sneaks in, but then only through culture.

vi. fragments

Drawing, the entirety of the act, must flow through her body. A kind of choreography. A movement that also exists in the color, a question go rhythm, energy, a very personal quality then. In her paintings there exists also a kind of interstice, lacuna - a distance between form and fragment. Even the fragmentary in the pictures is a personal experience: to move to another country, speaking the language of the country without having an emotional contact with the words one articulates. The fragment is the oppositeion, but not the denial of - on the contrary rather - the totality of the physical rhythm, which is as strongly perceivable as it is inevitable.

vii. passages

Motifs that reoccur in picture after picture must be multifaceted. A motif-cell must not be unambiguous. A cross is not only a religious symbol, it is a plus sign, which in the next instance transforms to a rudimentary handpainted sign. In one of the recent paintings by Rantanen, ”Imaginary Gestures” 1997, plus signs and X’s hover over a space of crosses, connected in such subdued shades that they are barely discernible. The color and the smallest of forms melt together in a rotation, for which I can find but one suitable expression: the smile of the painting.
 In the clarkty of drawing, which is created in a movement or springs forth from encountering surfaces, contrast is the foremost of foundations. So also with Rantanen. Yet, even though the drawing may be the first of phases in the painting, she further vitalizes it by the combinations accrued within a decidedly painterly thinking and attitude. This foundation is given timbre through the qualities of color. Not merely through the contrasting of effect, but through the tensions which may best be described in the antithesis of hot and cold. The dark space of crosses in ”Imaginary Gestures” is but one example. In other paintings she pushes the heat further with brilliant fireworks that cling like droplets or rub against the glitter of silver: ”Describing the Describable, ”Common Assumption of the Ritual”, Potentially Endless Sets”, all from 1997.
 Rantanen is never tempered. An artist in a big city, where she is a stranger, must be clear to herself, and others. She may not stand estranged, confronted with her own extremes. This is an existential as well as an artistic issue.

vii. motif

Signs and forms recur - now as individuals; now as armies trod ding over the paintings. Gathered together from a multitude of founts, preferably patterns created through the many handicrafts women have, and still do, engaged themselves with. Yet, here still, they spring from the most diverse of sources. ”Everything is motion between the kitchen and the glamour,” Rantanen pointed out in an interview some years ago.
 Some recurring motifs are the crosses, the rectangle, a rhythmically flowing line, small squares, figures of patterns, etc. This is a part of the pictorial flowing line, small squares, Figures of patterns, etc. This is a part of the pictorial world, but it is preceded by Rantanens concern with the artistic and its material.Getting very close to the painting one see the delicate traces following the brush, the manifold ways she has used the colors in and of themselves. The painterly process, the skillful craftsmanship, the masterly touch of the medium enables her to use the motif-cells with great variety. One could compare it with the use of parameters in music. If a pianist, for example, variates a tone through the intensity of the touch, Rantanen variates a motif-cell by painting it, in different contexts-translucent, transparent, opaque, or with or without a structure. The emotional expression is thus transformed. In the handling of the material dwells the intuitive, emotional ground of the paintings. For certain it mirrors the artist’s own strong experience  of presence - now - as she paints. A certain parameter - for example layers of color, paint-texture, translucent surface - as used with some motif cells, receives a discernably different expression if the same parameter is applied to a different motif-cell. Just look the rhythmical rolling, almost melodically drawn arabesque, is transformed in different paintings. In the way she executes the paintings there is a musical consequence. One might rather compare the cinematic form, I mentioned beforehand, with the contrasting parts of a piece of music, which is yet profoundly intertwined through a deeply felt underlying movement. This is the riddle of the composition.

ix. repetition

Repetition can be purely riteal, a recurrent necessity. It can also be a way of evoking a certain mood. of sorrow, calm or concentration. Or, why not, a condition of beauty, a beauty that has just burst through the walls of conventional beauty in a quest for a new space. Repetitions can be as voices layered one upon the other. The forms disguising one another; mocking us through likenesses. When the underlying layers burst through it comes with a violent force. A glimpse is enough to be swept on to an entirely different world - the same, yet anew. This is the kernel of repetition.

x. on forebodings

Through the layerings we are witnesses to an event, a history, an occurrence. On one level this is the narrative trait of picture, It is about desire and devotion. But, also, it is about how rules are crossed by chaos. In the overlaying patters rifts are hinted at. Perhaps this is where the painting of Mari Rantanen begins.

– Thomas Millroth

The text was published in the catalog

Mari Rantanen Ystads konstmuseum 1.11.–7.12.1997
Translations: Johan Widen / Steven R. Dixon