Extended

Paul Valery

Titled after Leonard Cohen’s song “Closing Time”, the latest cycle of works by Hannu Palosuo presented on this occasion was created during the lockdown period we all experienced in recent months. Influenced by Cohen’s poetic and rhythmic words evoking life’s memories, the artist returned to one of the core themes of his creative process: exploring the depths of memory and the passage of time. Reality, like history, is always crossed by chills from the past, and it is only to these that the artist’s memory refers when engaging with art.

The dreamlike nature of Palosuo’s painting is represented in the exhibition by oil paintings on wallpaper that recall his family home, and still lifes on Brazilian coffee sacks evoking memories of distant exotic journeys. It is a dizzying reworking of thought that imagines other space-time visions anchored to faded flashbacks, like old family photographs. Moving attempts to stop time, to grasp it in its flow and turn it into a visual fragment. Enigmas, references, and allusions — melodies of inner memory, like Cohen’s poems.

In each of Palosuo’s paintings — whether human figures, chairs, vases of flowers, or still lifes — color plays a central role, especially evident in this latest series, as a tool for defining forms and staging their essence. The subject must occupy space by describing it. The sunlit yellows, fiery reds, natural greens, and cobalt blues — seemingly painted by the wind that drags them across the canvas — and the grays shaping perspective and recalling traces of the past, are all human elements carried within us. These works, conceived from within, generate a connection between art and life, engaging with the social fabric to which we belong. It is a space where the true wheel of existence is highlighted: the alternation of life and death, the regeneration of human cycles that repeat over centuries and shape our history and present. This creative journey shows how between the solid and the intangible there are no boundaries. The surface thus appears unchanging and timeless, blooming and leaving behind its radical transformation. “The next day I tried to go beyond. I sought to express the truest and most accurate image — and lost it,” says the artist. Its essence is therefore pure mystery. Art is a miracle of life that demands constant work, and through these works, part of that task — the eternal search for the “self” — has been fulfilled.

Massimo Scaringella