oohart艺术

Petri Ala-Maunus’ studio is in an industrial area of Helsinki, set amidst hardware stores, car-repair workshops, and small businesses that make or sell things that is hard to identify when looking from the outside. Their yards are filled with cars, and somewhere someone is using a drill. Inside the studio another world opens up. Leaning against the walls are large-format landscape paintings in which we see no trace of the presence of human beings. They are bleak views into a world either before or after humankind, and astonishingly precisely executed. Are the paintings images of some lost paradise or premonitions of a post-human world where the Four Elements of Antiquity have broken free of the grip of humanity? There is at least one allusion to this in the title that Ala-Maunus has given his exhibition: The New Wild. The works are greatly indebted particularly to the school of Romantic landscape painting that emerged from the art academy in Düsseldorf, Germany, in the first half of the 19th century and spread everywhere with academy’s former students. The most prominent Finn to work in Düsseldorf was Werner Holmberg, whose art Ala-Maunus has evidently studied carefully. The Romantic artists favoured untouched and untamed nature, which they portrayed meticulously, dramatizing it. They frequently depicted nature as greater than the human individual, evoking both fear and admiration at the same time. Similar aspirations can also be detected in Ala-Maunus’ paintings. Real-life mountains and waterfalls were not enough for the Romantics. Their paintings were assemblages constructed in the studio, the sketches for them coming from different places or even from different countries. They were types of collages, whose purpose was to engender feelings of awe and alarm. The landscapes in Ala-Maunus’ paintings are also collages composed of dozens of parts and details. They are also landscape simulations in the sense intended by Jean Baudrillard, copies without an original.