AU-DELÀ / Text by Riikka Stewen / 2007

Hannaleena Heiska paints in a technique that demands utter concentration. Nothing can be changed once it is done, and the image has to be finished in one session, in a process where everything – each brush stroke and decision to wipe off colour – is left in view. We might call the paintings on primed MDF board drawings or even photographs: they capture and swiftly shape out something seen and experienced fleetingly, something hovering at the edge of vision. A postcard or a poster or indeed some piece of music or a film, can be the basis, or more precisely the technical aid of the paintings, but the paintings really try to capture that which lies on the other side of the images. They are visions, views to a reality that sometimes intersects our mundane reality.

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Thus the images are traps or baits, the painter's tools for trying to get in touch with a reality that escapes cruder instruments. They are used for painting au-delà, that which is beyond, not directly but through other representations instead. Trying to capture it directly could perhaps be too foolhardy: mysteries should be approached gently, through winding paths, and they mustn’t be revealed carelessly… In painting, the tradition of au-delà goes back to the short era of Romanticism, to Fuseli, Goya, Redon and the Symbolists. Hannaleena Heiska seems to agree with these artists in her paintings: there are layers in the visible, the light of science and Enlightenment does not reveal everything existing at one glance.

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There is admirable lightness and sense of effortlessness in Heiska’s paintings, they are deliberate and carefully made, sometimes humoristic as well; indeed, secret does not signify obscurity or staidness. The brush strokes visualise space and expanse, while simultaneously registering hidden views like an optical data storage device. On the other hand, the paintings pick out the current world and the contents of our minds, both full of recycled views, among the haziness of mundane perceptions. With her paintings, the artist reinterprets images that affect us and our consciousness and maps out their sphere of influence as she fares in the worlds of kitsch, films and Gothic culture.

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Surprisingly, the technique of the paintings also calls the tradition of Chinese brush painting to mind – perhaps because contemporary western painting simply lacks a precise and exact vocabulary for describing the various qualities of brush strokes? When we speak about Hannaleena Heiska’s paintings, we would need an infinite number of adjectives to describe what European Renaissance painters simply called sprezzatura. Sprezzatura meant effortless and spontaneous skill and grace, as well as the skill to conceal the skill behind the casualness. The spontaneous-seeming mastery of technique in Hannaleena Heiska’s paintings is connected to what she wants to depict with them. Could anything else but an extremely precise and fast technique capture an overlapping reality that appears for the most fleeting moment among our ordinary one?