Taidemaalariliitto

Enoch Bergsten

Shitshow:
A situation or event that is badly organized, unpleasant, and full of confusion

Mattias Löfqvist

Many of the paintings are small, with limp compositions and layers of paint that seem like they could fall off the paintings at any moment. Colors return, shapes return, compositions repeat. Like building a house from ready-made building elements.

What I do in this project is to visualize rooms from my childhood. I’ve gone into my friends’ homes, gone through the closets and magazines in the parents’ bedrooms, stood in the neighbors’ kitchens in the empty houses. Places I haven’t been in over 30 years.
I try to paint the tobacco smoke in the walls, the darkness of the long corridor, the phone ringing, the unfamiliar smell at a friend’s house, old conversations and strange moods.

I have no idea how well my paintings correspond to any objective reality, how similar the rooms in my paintings are to the real rooms. I have no photo references. Instead, I see these paintings as a way for me to enter into myself; Into spaces created by the memory of situations in my childhood; inner psychological (non-physical) spaces.

In other words, the pictures are interiors in more than one way. The thematical content can also be said to be interiors, inner rooms, psychological rooms. Like an inner landscape enclosed in a one floor brickhouse built in the late 70s.

Matti Närekangas

East Helsinki-based visual artist Matti Närekangas (b.1983) has been actively working in visual arts since 2017. Närekangas is studying Master’s studies in the Painting department in the The University of the Arts Helsinki.