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Contact:
ilari.hautamaki (at) gmail.com
Represented by Helsinki Contemporary
Ilari Hautamäki (b. 1983) is a Helsinki based visual artist. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2011 and has since shown actively in solo and group exhibitions. His most recent sizeable solo exhibition was at the HAM Gallery, Helsinki, in 2017. His group exhibitions include those at Mänttä Art Festival, Hämeenlinna Art Museum, Jyväskylä Art Museum, and the Young Artists exhibition at Kunsthalle Helsinki. In 2018-2019, Hautamäki took part in The Touchexhibition series at Tornio Art Museum, Seinäjoki Art Hall and Pro Artibus’ Sinne gallery in Helsinki. His works are represented in Helsinki Art Museum, HAM’s collection, the Wihuri art collection, and elsewhere.
About working :
”The foundation of my work is the basic elements of painting : Colours and shapes / rhythm and composition. I move in between abstraction and figuration, leaving the viewer with a picture in which there is no single interpretation.
I usually begin my paintings with a fast and intuitive painting act, which follows up a careful and planned process. In this process I tend to let the paintings take the lead, I can make very dramatic changes on my paintings in the very end. I often combine organic elements, that may resemble foliage and nature, with industrial forms and solid, geometrical shapes. I play around and balance with a combination of planning and intuition / organic and industrial, which gives a tension and synthesis for my work.
The nature like elements formed up in a rather gradual manner. After many attempts on making mark and gesture I came to a realization that the motive I was seeking for all along was closer than I knew of: Just out side the door. The endeavour is not to picture nature as it is, but rather interpret it’s character from my memory.” – Ilari Hautamäki, 2018.
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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.
