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I am Ilari Hautamäki (b. 1983), a Helsinki based visual artist, working mainly with painting and drawing, printmaking and public artworks. I have studied fine arts in the Academy in Helsinki where I received my MA in 2011.
My paintings move in the middle ground of abstraction and figuration, in which the dialogue of organic and architectural elements creates a tension. In my work I have been exploring the relationship between the motive and the background: I am equally interested in the negative spaces in between the objects – ”Which one becomes more relevant?” A question the Modernists were also pondering with. Intuition plays a big role in my painting process, as well as form, colour and rhythm, the basic elements of painting.
Contact / Inquies:
ilari.hautamaki(at)gmail.com
@ilarihautamaki
In the Studio – Interview with Collectors Agenda (Wienna/Austria).
Read the interview HERE.
Up coming exhibition:
Solo exhibition at the Painters Union’s Gallery, Helsinki, August 2026.
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TEXTS:
”An even synthesis of opposites”
Text by Saara Heikinheimo (Art historian/Curator) for ”16-21 Paintings Ilari Hautamäki ” publication in 2021.
There is a small chapel in the medieval city of Vence in southern France whose interior is a shining example of Modernist painting. This work of art was designed by Henri Matisse as a thank you to the Dominican nuns who treated him for a serious illness and gave him a new lease on life. La Chapelle du Rosaire was completed in 1951 as a result of this cathartic experience. It can be considered the apex and crown jewel of Matisse’s works.
The ultramarine, lemon yellow and cobalt green stained glass windows feature flora. The abstracted forms of the petals are painted against solid colours. Rectangular stained glass with translucent and glowing bright colours create a contrast with the sacral images painted in black outlines by Matisse on white ceramic tiles. Aesthetically, the work is based on the careful use of a few elements, fluid contrast, a careful layout and simplicity. The end result is perfectly harmonious.
When I look at the young Ilari Hautamäki’s (b. 1983) colourful, apparently random and nevertheless carefully arranged paintings, my thoughts return to Modernism, the tradition of abstract art and especially Matisse’s late works, including the stained glass paintings of the Vence chapel. Especially in the last few years, Hautamäki’s works have shown a clarity and power that place him, in my regard, more and more in the tradition of Modernism and they reveal an original and confident painter whose progress I will follow with great interest in the future.
Towards a new language of forms
To arrive at his current phase, one must return to 2015 when Hautamäki was preparing an exhibition for Forum Box. Until then, his paintings had been exact geometric shapes built from grids lined with tape that showed evidence of early computer game graphics. They had also featured abstract spaces or spaces remotely resembling landscapes, print-like camouflage patterns and skulls. He was looking for new topics that would be more easily approachable and liberating to the artist. They should offer possibilities for variation and a platform for long-term work. Hautamäki begun showing an interest in seriality. He had created versions of the grid theme in a series shown at the Korjaamo Gallery in 2013, but at the time this remained a one-off experiment.
His new subjects were found surprisingly close by. His studio had long had a Yucca plant whose leaves Hautamäki began to imitate. Soon plants began to interest him more and a new language of forms started to intuitively take shape. Nature and forests have always been important to Hautamäki. Plants are a shared and common interest in Hautamäki’s family, and this is probably why they became intriguing to him in an artistic sense as well. Organic and lush, their shapes and colours provided much to examine. The simultaneously abstract and representative nature of the plants held a lot of possibilities. Imitating and, on the other hand, trying to clarify their chaotic nature seemed like a meaningful challenge. They also gave room for Hautamäki’s distinctive airy and spontaneous brushwork. The artist’s preference for green colours also had an effect. Cobalt green was one of his favourite colours and sap green in oils is reportedly amazing in its transparency, vividness and slightly yellowish tone. This was a natural segue to the plant theme.
Still life – one of the main genres of painting and one that holds a special place in Modernism as well – was another interest that pushed the artist towards the subject of plants. The Modernists were interested in still life because it represents the aesthetics and intrinsic value of art in itself. The still life created the conditions for the free examination of composition, light, shadow and form. The cubists exploded the idea of the object and revealed it in its more basic form by reanalysing it. The background and object overlap into an even surface, an ambiguous space.
Hautamäki’s first plant-themed series of paintings were exhibited in the spring of 2016 during a group show with three other artists at the Hämeenlinna Art Museum. The paintings showed plants in ceramic pots arranged on tables or hanging from the ceiling, bouquets in vases and thick vegetation, brush and foliage. The plant themes were painted with both spontaneous and light brushstrokes as well as thicker paint. They included abstract shapes that bring to mind camouflage patterns. The background was made of even, mostly rectangular fields of colour that create a three-dimensional effect. The grid-theme was visible as bricks and tile-like surfaces. As a whole, the series appeared to still be mostly figurative.
Hautamäki’s solo show the following year at the Helsinki Art Museum exhibited even more liberated, lush and twisting walls of greenery, after which the exhibition was also named. The jungle-like foliage nevertheless remained composed and structured. The contrast between the background and the organic shapes was also deliberate, the latter remaining the actual theme. The background was clearly made to serve the object and its purpose was primarily to provide a platform or frame for the actual theme. The plant motifs were painted with the same technique as the works from the previous year, alternating between light and more forceful brushstrokes. The camouflage shapes were still present. The palette shifted between different greens and blues, vivid pastels on pinks, violets, magentas, oranges and yellows. The delicious palette added an almost fantastic element to the works. The imagination is stimulated when one thinks what kinds of oases and Edenic gardens are revealed behind the green walls. My thoughts wander to Motohiko Odani’s video work Rompers (2003) where the paradisiacal landscape is almost too perfect.
The Helsinki Contemporary’s 2019 Indoor Fireworks exhibition may be viewed as the summary of the first steps toward a new artistic direction. The work shown at the front of the gallery contained two kinds of green wall paintings: impenetrable monochromatic foliage and more ethereal compositions where the colours had exploded in bloom. Orange and yellow backgrounds contrasted with green and blue, with a pinch of violet. Interesting studies in complementary colours. The exhibition also included a more referential series of four plant still lives that were painted against solid monochromatic backgrounds. The pot or vase was depicted by a rectangle drawn in faint charcoal. The parts and petals of the plants were simple shapes, light and airy. They appear to have begun their metamorphosis towards fresh and more abstract shapes.
Modernist in his own way
Ilari Hautamäki is a disciplined artist. His work is guided by planning and schedules the artist thinks also liberates his creativity. With the birth of his first child, he can no longer spend late nights in his studio, but he has always been industrious and tried to move purposefully toward each of his goals.
Hautamäki demands a lot from the painting process. He does little sketching beforehand, and the first push for the painting is born in the moment, intuitively and with brisk brushstrokes in a fast-drying and almost aquarelle-like acrylic or ink mixed with water. His latest works use only oil paint. His methods are akin to action painting, or informalism, as it is also known in Europe. It is only at the next stage that Hautamäki steps back from the work and starts painting the more even surfaces of the background in oils. The order is thus reversed, in a way: the details are created first and only then the background takes shape. A long meditative phase may precede the painting process, but this takes place only in the mind of the artist.
Hautamäki is first and foremost a painter, and therefore it was somewhat surprising when he started drawing in the spring of 2020 – every morning. He used oil sticks to draw colour studies that, in hindsight, were transformative. Hautamäki is fascinated by Joseph Albers’s lifetime of dedication to colours and varying a single geometric theme, the square. Hautamäki’s colour studies start the same as those of Albers: with cool and warm colours, combining them and the harmonising of values and complementary colours. Of the members of the Bauhaus movement, however, Kandinsky’s colour theory is most familiar to Hautamäki. Kandinsky thought that colour was central and form only a way to delineate it. The composition of the painting is based on these two methods. Different forms influence colours: a triangle, for example, enhances yellow because, according to Kandinsky, sharp colours generate the most vibrations in sharp forms.
Despite his role models and their influence, Hautamäki himself has a mostly untheoretical approach to colour. He thinks that even an apparently impossible colour can work if it is placed correctly in relation to other colours and elements. The aim is to achieve harmony through restraint. Especially his latest works show how Hautamäki has unleashed his inner colourist. Colour, in addition to form, composition and brushwork, is one of the most important elements of painting.
Overall, it is apparent that Hautamäki has a perfect grasp of the Modernist tradition and borrows elements from it in a relaxed and effortless manner. The artist has had to follow a complex road to get here. If in his youth Modernism seemed stuffy and conventional, these days his attitude has changed into gentle humour, or at least he does not take the matter too seriously. In addition to the Bauhaus, Hautamäki feels an affinity toward the so-called giants of Modernism such as Picasso and Matisse. Paul Klee was one of his favourite artists even before he began his studies.
The designs of his recent paintings have moved toward abstraction. The plant motifs have gained typographical features and one can see references to mathematical notation in them. The compositions have gained an occasional lightness and airiness. Especially in the compositions of the Sequences (2021) series, I can see similarities with Miró. The division between the object and the background is still expressed with contrastive brushstrokes, but their hierarchical separation is not as apparent as before. The background is formed from geometric shapes in various colours that seem to be based on the colour studies of Study Series. Hautamäki says he spent a long time looking for the correct proportions for the geometric forms and the themes in the forefront, and that they are now clearly finding their place. The goal is to create tension, moods and the illusion of space. That is, a synthesis of different elements. Hautamäki seems to seek three-dimensionality once again, but approaches it in more subtle way than in the paintings he produced a few years ago. The contrastive brushwork creates the sense of space as well.
When one looks at Hautamäki’s current works and how he has progressed, everything seems to finally return to the relationship between and analysis of the background and the object. At one point, Hautamäki created camouflage patterns as backgrounds to accompany organic themes as if by blending everything into a single whole. This was followed by an emphasis on plant themes on strong monochromatic backgrounds, and finally a breaking down of the background into geometric parts in various shapes.
While preparing the Forum Box exhibition, Hautamäki thought that the object and the background are two different things in painting. While thinking about the dichotomy after finishing the exhibition, he noticed that Matisse had also studied the topic in his portrait interiors where, for example, patterns on the wallpaper are repeated in the model’s clothing. The background blends with the object and vice versa. Which one is the theme of the painting? Matisse came up with the idea that a decorative motif expands the surface on which it is painted and that it distorts and masks the proportions of the background. The thought can also be applied in reverse.
Ilari Hautamäki’s art sings. The paintings are easily translated into the language of music. There is a beat and a theme, melodies with countermelodies, interesting and surprising harmonic structures. Long lines and, on the other hand, accents and nuances, because some paintings are louder than others.
The paintings sound mostly like jazz. I am not surprised to hear that the works in his Helsinki Contemporary exhibition last year were created while listening to jazz and especially spiritual jazz. I put on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. The saxophone begins with the brief and prophetic intro (first spontaneous brushstrokes), followed by the bass playing the iconic theme, the piano and drums playing in the background (flat surfaces of colour). The saxophone continues preaching through variations of the melody, and the four-part album alternates its focus between the other instruments. The piano’s syncopated chords are drawn in my mind as geometric shapes that carry the passages played on the saxophone, and occasionally they rise to parallel the melody. It is about dialogue, creating tension and balance between two elements. Ilari Hautamäki’s paintings are precisely about this: the struggle between two opposing elements – or, more accurately, a harmonious coexistence where both elements need each other.
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”The surface offers everything”
Text by Veikko Halmetoja (Gallerist/Curator) for GREENWALL exhibition at HAM Gallery in 2017.
Many typical questions surrounding paintings seem out of context when examining Ilari Hautamäki’s works. What do these paintings tell, what do they portray? The answers are less relevant. Hautamäki’s paintings are based on form. Their subjects adapt well to this purpose as abstract arrangements starring plants. Be the subject a greenwall, a flower pot, or a climbing plant, the subject becomes secondary to the surface. Hautamäki represents intellectual contemporary painting where the form is the most important content. This said, we can forget the question of representation. A more interesting question is to ask what the paintings tell. And even that would better be phrased as: What happens in these paintings?
Through a first inspection, the seemingly static paintings seem to include many different events. These events do not inform us of growth, landscapes, nor even of the cultural history of still lifes. The events in the paintings are tensions, forces and balances between different forms and colours. This is all ambiguous. The spectator’s previous knowledge of the history of abstract art undoubtedly plays a part in their interpretation. Another part is played by the visual experiences already known to excite the viewer. Some might look at the paintings through one’s own experiences of nature, others through virtual reality or architecture. The fundamental experience has to do with different perceptions of beauty.
An emblematic feature of Hautamäki’s art is a two-fold colour palette. Hautamäki is a colourist, yet one who uses primary colours very deliberately. The range of colour often shifts to white, leading to strong contrasts between pastel hues and a scarce scale of primary colours, as seen in several paintings. A bright, translucent green dominates the paintings. Strong and lively, it offers a breathing counterpart to the pastel colours in their comfortable, static standstill. The dichotomy of two different worlds of form is also based on the inner movement of painted surfaces. The calm surfaces of colour and the elements confining the illusion of movement throughout the surface of the piece battle the bold, relaxed, expressive-like brushstrokes as freely as the leaves of a climbing plant against a tile wall.Hautamäki does not represent a mechanical or efficient type of abstract painting. He reaches for a voiced imagery where the decaying form of informalism fits into the same arrangement with conventional concretism through an obedient irony. His works are often confined inside the painted surface. The concrete solutions where Hautamäki frames his arrangement from almost every possible angle are like a declaration to examine the painting as a surface. On the other hand, the quiet hints grow louder and gain significance as the viewer aims to let the painting develop in one’s own mind well past its concrete surface.