THE LAST MAGAZINE, F/W 2009 / Text by Katie Kitamura, 20

Black metal, Shakespeare, Venetian revels - the world of Hannaleena
Heiska is full of unlikely marriages and references.  She creates frankly surprising images: a tattooed tiger wearing an elaborate headdress, or masked revelers signaling and gesturing from out of a wood. Each painting draws from times past and present to create a densely imagined, instantly unforgettable world. / Considered as a group, Heiska’s paintings seem almost like tableaux for an unwritten play; each painting functions as the portrait of a new and intriguing character.  The narrative that ties this disparate group together is the landscape itself.  Icy and mystical, dazzling and unrelenting, it’s as much a condition as a backdrop - a condition to which all of Heiska’s figures are bound.

THE LAST MAGAZINE    2/5

Heiska’s work narrates the slow passage out of the body and into the spirit world, or at least something that looks much like it. In her paintings, elements of daily life slowly recede; the fantastical and the possessed gradually grow more dominant. Against the gradations of this change, Heiska stages a bacchanal gathering of masked figures, tattooed circus animals, revelers and dreamers. / Heiska’s figures live somewhere between the circus and the masquerade, a nomadic community whose location is never static. They are attached to a version of reality that is still recognizable to all of us, even if it is not precisely our own. But there is also another set of characters that seem to have retreated further into Heiska’s icy wonderland, perhaps beyond the point of return. If the nomadic revelers are our way into this world, then these other figures are the reason we are drawn in. / Many of Heiska’s paintings feel like A Midsummer Night’s Dream transposed into an icier setting; the slow undoing of the line between the bestial and the human occurs in nearly all her works. And as in the play, beneath the revelry and the beauty is a barely concealed sense of both menace and melancholy. That sense is often at work in Heiska’s titles themselves, many of which are taken from black metal songs: Beware the Woods at Night, Beware the Lunar Light (2008), Tragedies Blow at Horizon (2009), And Love Said No (2008).

THE LAST MAGAZINE   3/5

Heiska’s most fascinating creations are in the latter stages of this metamorphosis, characters that mix menace with tragedy.  Her paintings have their own kind of heartbreak: Tragedies Blow at Horizon depicts a demurely masked female figure on her way into some kind of unbearable metamorphosis. She sits on a tasseled and embroidered chair, in an abandoned landscape of wintry trees.  Her hands and clothes are recognizably human, but her eyes are blank and her face has been obscured. / These figures have none of the levity of Heiska’s midnight revelers. Instead, they are melancholic in the extreme, as well as often extravagantly beautiful. That beauty is almost deliberately purposeless; it is used to communicate the sense of a lost world, of a time that has past. The title of Against the Tide (In the Arctic World) (2009) directly communicates this sense of being cut adrift, and out of step with time. In the painting, a tiger looks out with a regal and piercing gaze.  But like the other figures in this loosely constituted group, he is static and half frozen.

THE LAST MAGAZINE   4/5

Perhaps the key painting here is In My Kingdom Cold (2009), which plays with the same idea of stasis and loss. In the painting, an antlered figure is draped in an animal skin. The antlers are decorated with luminous pearls, the hairs on the black pelt distinct, but the face of the figure itself is slowly melting downward and the eyes are white and blank. Heiska’s paintings depict hybrids, and the meeting point between two worlds; what In My Kingdom Cold suggests is that those two worlds are as much between the worlds of life and death as anything else. // That meeting point - the interplay between the familiar and the confoundingly new, the sense of a world that touches upon our own, and yet remains completely unknown - is where Heiska locates her work. Familiar items become, in this context, quietly significant. The most haunting visual point of Tragedies Blow at Horizon are the clasped hands of the figure, clutching at some hazily drawn object. The pose of the hands is mundane and familiar, but in a sense that’s precisely the point; it’s the pulsing sense of something human underneath the monstrous and the strange that makes the painting so effective.

THE LAST MAGAZINE   5/5

Heiska’s paintings possess an eerie combination of vibrancy and paralysis. She captures a vanishing but not yet vanished world, a world of both stillness and unrest. The tremulous quality of the paintings is in part an effect of the subject matter, but it also has to do with the very act of painting itself as Heiska practices it. Working without preparatory drawings or photographs, Heiska produces each work in a single sitting. The resulting paintings appear as though they are in a permanent state of settling onto the canvas. They are tremulous but fixed, living but inanimate. / That is, in a sense, the hallmark of all good painting, but in this case that is also the story that Heiska is, with her strange family of figures and animals, trying to tell - the story of magic and fixity, and the wagers of art and other myths. Her paintings are full of stories, but the real story she may be trying to tell us is one about the both the purposes and frustrations of art.  She does this with the lightest of touches, which is only one of the many successes of her work.