Suomeksi
Suomeksi
Great clarity and great mystery meet in Seppo Similä's art just as they do in the
northern landscape. Artists are often magicians and Similä is one of them, in his
own and very special way: his landscapes, interiors, flowers, bushes and trees
impress the viewer as powerfully natural, yet they extend into supernatural
regions - like dreams. This happens, because the pictures represent the scenery
of the artist's soul, charged and replete with a meaning: a meaning which can
be interpreted only with pain - or not at all.
Their combination of artistic weight and power can perhaps be compared to a
battery: the artist has "charged" his work and the viewer receives from it
a "current" which generates experiences and thoughts of his own. The interpretation
has, therefore, not necessarily to follow every smallest movement of the artist's soul
and mind; it suffices that the impact of the work continues to act in the viewer who,
then, begins to live and to experience its streams of power. They exercise their
influence on him and set in motion the current and the potency of his own genuine
imagination.
Seppo Similä is no academic painter. He has followed a self-set path, has searched
and found, has created his technique and his capacity of work. He uses nevertheless
the classic materials: oil paint on canvas. A few pictures painted on hard surfaces
date back to an early period, around 1973.
Similä's technique has changed from period to period and sometimes even according to
the demands of a specific painting. To the early period belong pictures of strong
color and an almost psychedelic style from which, however, distinctive forms arise:
landscapes in their totality, human figures, and so on.
Photograph © Arto Ylisaukko-oja 2000
Particularly in farmhouse interiors and in many landscapes Similä follows closely the
principles of the so-called photographic realism. Clear deviations appear, however,
in the "microstructures" of the paintings and his use of color: the "psychological
color" glides often delicately - almost imperceptibly - into the foreground and
assumes pictorially expressed significance.
In some of his woman portraits, Similä has made use of a technique reminiscent of
the contemporary pressure- or spraygun technique: different colors appear on the
canvas in tiniest spots which melt into each other and give the total impression
of a unified color surface. (The pointillism, born as a side-manifestation of
impressionism, employed spots of color so large and bright, that they remained
a discernible part of the picture's total effect.)
Similä has not only cleared his road in the field of his technique. He has also
created his personal language of imagery in the area of content. It is as if he had
been searching for topics which corresponded in the deepest and most perfect fashion
to the quality of that which he had to communicate, and to the size of the charge.
...
In Similä's paintings one meets the inestimable inside world of imagination. Genuine
as dreams - and nevertheless common to all - like dreams. The pictures are spectacles
in which the basic emotions of life are freely circling. With the assurance of dreams
they strive for the hidden harmony of the soul and create in the mind of the viewer
strong vibrations...
Many of Similä's works are not far from surrealism. Flamelike figures and shreds of
shells emerge from unreality and reach reality. They touch upon the viewer's anxieties,
his innermost feelings, grope for the limits of humanity... Blacksmiths in their smithies,
a laborer with his mattock, women, torn to pieces, tools, everything arises in shapes
not ever seen before... Churns, flower-vases meet, coming out of holes burned into
extraordinary structures.
Several subdivisions can be found in Seppo Similä's work. One of the most interesting
is the series WOMAN which starts with the birth of Venus - a succession of mythic
pictures which present the unfolding of life - the birth of a girl - a human being -
a thought. The series continues with the innocent Graces, the lyric nymphs of the
pond in the forest and from there one moves on in a dazzle of blinding light - on
to oneself, to the attraction and power of conscientiousness being born... to the
seductresses in the wood, theatrically stretched out on the soft ground. This ascent
and midday of the life of woman is followed by catastrophy and explosion. The wholeness
on the self is shattered - the beautiful woman reduced to the hollow parts of the human
anatomy - a ghostlike, empty, perishable garnishing, far from all nature - painted by
Similä in the mode of Dali's beauty, set against an antique background of powerful
vegetation, the biosphere... Death appears in these pictures in his medieval
manifestation, a mighty skeleton which gnaws at the human body and reaps a plentiful
harvest.
Then comes the end. Entanglement in cobwebs, utter helplessness, powerlessness, blindness,
submission and destruction. The death of Venus - the last hopeless gesture of the raised,
already stiffened hand. Nevertheless there follows still the one and only last phase,
an afterimage perhaps or a beautiful fiction: a space of huge blue clouds - as if
already past death - and above the clouds the figure of a woman - still present despite
it all - but hopelessly waiting for her fulfillment, her soul...
In question is not only the history of woman - in question is the history of the human
soul - perhaps of mankind itself. The artist is related to it in his own way - would
the flame of a painful illusion be the focal point of his consciousness?
Seppo Similä takes a persuasive hold of his viewer. His imagery tells in a powerful
language of the plot of ground which he has tilled himself. Even the size of his paintings
is unusually large - often they are 2-3 metres (79-118 inches) high, 4.5-9 metres
(177-354 inches) wide! This size is for Similä neither an external boast nor the pursuit
of superficial effects: it is an essential part of the message he has to transmit.
The magnitude of the work stresses the magnitude of the forces which prepare the
translucent soul for an expansion of consciousness. The boundaries of physical reality
are shattered, the inner reality takes over, the illusion of threedimensionality shocks
the viewer. With magic power the pictures tear the curtain which hides the many strata
of his consciousness, his dreams.
Towards a language of his own
Threedimensionality, the illusion of space, becomes gradually an important element
of Similä's work. Particularly the foreground of the painting is of graphic palpability
in the landscapes as well as in the interiors. The effect is reached partly by the
painstaking observation of the laws of perspective and the sensitive attention given
to color perspective, partly by the very personal approach to space which Similä
has found. He treats the small structural elements of the picture surface like an
experimenting chemist: the miniature pattern of the brushwork changes periodically
as the view extends into distance, the layers of color stand in contrast to each
other, the script of the brush creates in amazing fashion a "psychological" space.
One has only to look at the thatched roof in the painting The Shed: upon close inspection
one sees that the single stalks of straw are the result of vigorous brush strokes
(by no means of the petty busy-work, found e.g. in market place art. For Similä,
exactness is a means for magnifying spiritual potency.), yet from a greater distance
the straw appears to be supernaturally real, to reflect powerfully the light of the sun.
Phases of the soulwoman
Ilkka Juhani Takalo-Eskola