FACING THE STRANGE / Text by Pilvi Kalhama / 2006

While painting is the cornerstone of Hannaleena Heiska’s production, she also utilises other forms of expression expanding to different directions in her art. At times she moves between the forms of video and installation as well as explores multidimensional time in her work. Different layers of time merge together in the present. Above all, her works remind the viewer of the visual code and the themes of the 1980s. The feeling of familiarity stems from the elements of the past mingled with images and recollections. Heiska uses this material to assemble a new reality and closes up the gap between the past and present.

FACING THE STRANGE   2/5

The weft of subject matters and contexts is new and surprising – even somewhat strange. The mood is hazy and dreamlike. This Strange is accompanied by sensitively varying brushwork that occupies the entire area of an image as need dictates. Sometimes it is quick, relaxed and translucent, and then again deeply immersing. Among the nuances, the eye picks out strokes that seem to have been created by an extremely rigid and insecure grip on the brush. And strokes that stay on the surface of the painting, decoration-like and independent. The illusion of the image’s internal reality is broken and the viewer’s attention returns again to the brushwork: it is in the brush strokes that the painting is at its truest. / Heiska’s method of painting with its multitude of nuances lures the viewer to the work. The method brings out humanity, which is at its most interesting when contained in painting. It reminds the viewer of the events of the painting process, events that allow the artist to work her state of mind from insecurity to self-consciousness. The result is a finished work still manifesting those fissures and emotions that make the work unaffected and easy to approach for the viewer.

FACING THE STRANGE   3/5

However, the Strange of Heiska’s paintings is something that demands the viewers to work and interpret it. Familiar elements that hail back to the spirit of the 1980s guide the viewer and give a focal point to the images. The melodramatic tone, which we recognise from the posters of the age, is one of the paintings’ driving forces. Heiska draws animal and human figures from the love metal and glam rock genres and places them on a fantastic background. The nostalgic landscape, a strong visual element in Heiska’s paintings, is aesthetically intriguing and beautiful. Yet the pastel colour landscape is so stylised and high-flown that the viewer cannot ignore its emphasised prop-like quality. Haziness contrasts with the kitschy colours and motifs softening the direct reference to poster world’s decorative landscape imagery. Therefore unrestricted nostalgia is not the right phrase to describe Heiska’s work. It contains a fare dose of awareness, and playing around in the middle ground between expressive brushwork and conscious kitschy decoration will not allow us to forget it.

FACING THE STRANGE   4/5

So the landscape is as hazy as its meaning. Heiska’s work is like an unsolved paradox, created out of the mechanics of idiosyncratic combining. Attitudes that rarely fit within one method of treatment have been infiltrated into a single work. The pillars of the work are subtle irony and, on the other hand, almost open-armed naivety. Melodrama, playing with identities, external elegance and a spirit of camp, which have been interpreted as the superficial forms of stylisation, emerge as the thematic building blocks of Heiska’s art. / The world Heiska portrays is at the same time true as steel and a chance to smile and wonder. She treads an undefined zone and we can almost see her sniggering at her topics, but still admiring the pathos bred by genuine feelings. She gets inspired by a world where absolute emotions can be described by words from lyrics like ‘love’ and ‘death’: a world where such words are actually real. When those words are true to someone at a given moment, they are also extremely weighty. / Through her motifs, Heiska portrays ways of self-decoration and expression, which used to be insufficient topics for serious art. The viewers soon ask themselves if they should take those puffed up figures seriously. Or the animals whose decorations call to mind the fairytale world and games of dressing up?

FACING THE STRANGE   5/5

The question about what does being serious mean in contemporary art is actually inessential in Heiska’s art. The Vanitas motif appearing in her paintings – the skull symbol adopted now even by the popular culture – is one example of a motif with undefined value and reference. In art, Vanitas is an often used symbol of death and perishability, indeed so commonly used that the motif has become banal. Heiska gives no reference to how she is using it, but rather utilises its entire axis of meaning without evaluating it herself. Therefore the skull motif is to be creepy and macabre, and at the same time popular and meaningless. The Latin word, vanitas, refers to spuriousness and vanity. Thus in the context of Heiska’s art we can interpret the symbol as an alternative reverse to the world given as absolute, as a symbolic question mark attached to the painting. / Hannaleena Heiska’s skill is to fit authenticity, comicality, hardness and beauty in a single painting. She does it without clogging the space where the meaning of the work is supposed to get off the ground. Heiska builds up a strange mood where there is no absoluteness in her paintings. There are simply alternatives, and the artist creates space for the viewer to move between them. In that space – on the surfaces made by brushwork charged as Strange – the experience of the work’s present is created.