Anders Oinonen

Published in Beautiful/Decay Magazine

 

Anders Oinonen’s works achieve what every artist—crammed into a prerequisite Masters of American Art 101 class and fed a steady diet of dustily avant-garde slides from an ancient, white-bearded proponent of Modernism—impulsively desires to do. And that is, scribble a face over Kandinsky’s obtuse, potentially “spiritual” narratives. No biophysical-analytical, soul-vibrating, color-theory, symbolist-deconstruction needed here. No face-stroking, squinting analysis and informed proclamations: “The way this composition is elegantly arranged into linear passages could almost suggest a human face!” Nope—Oinonen really does paint faces. Well, faces whose spatial ambiguity and shape-shifting swaths of color could almost suggest abstract paintings, that is. Darn.

 

Herein lies the paradox and intellectual appeal of Oinonen’s works. His deceptively dopey conceptual figurations are like well-crafted pop songs—instantly pleasing iconic guilty pleasures that belie a virtuosic and well-studied composer behind their bubblegum facades, fully capable of the optical symphonic, but opting to craft within the visual vernacular. Oinonen simultaneously displays a begrudging (if not ironic) love for the very same passé visual tropes (lovingly mined from Abstract Expressionist heroes) he critiques. Case in point: in a practice similar to Franz Kline’s automatist drawings, aggrandized to ostentatious scales, Oinonen’s paintings are created from doodles; sometimes a tiny, quarter-inch mark mushrooms into a four foot tall painting. His lyrical choice of palette and soft, ethereally floating color field clouds would make Mark Rothko cry. In a gesture not unlike Duchamp’s bratty mustache across the face of the “Mona Lisa,” Oinonen, with a wink and a nod, somehow makes the tired genre both aware of its own shortcomings and relevant once again.

 

 

Can you talk about your process in creating these works?

 

My process is pretty simple. I draw faces in as many variations as possible and wait for one to strike me in a strange way. If it’s weird enough, then it’s worth painting. I tend to revisit themes and compositions when they still interest me. The drawings range from fairly intricate to simple gestures, and then get blown up to different scales, depending. Sometimes a quarter inch mark can end up four feet tall. The paintings themselves are then worked out on the canvas. 

 

Do you ever use sources for your faces, or are they sifted entirely from the annals of your imagination?

 

They’re mainly from my brain. Of course, I get inspired from other sources, but the drawings come from an automatic kind of process. I do have a nice west-facing view in my studio, so I steal a lot of colors from sunsets, too.

 

Typically you favor a bright, candy-colored palette that is aesthetically pleasing without being predictable or obviously so, not unlike the sublime handling of a colorist such as Matisse. What would you say the role of color is within your works? How do you choose and employ your palette?

 

I use color to generate space in different ways. Like, if I’m depicting an edge or a contour, I sometimes use colors that will flicker with each other to create a 2D equivalent of stereoscopic focus. Or likewise, I might make an edge recede with some sfumato. I think about where colors sit in space and make mental notes about what I think they do or represent in relation to each other. How colors affect mood, I’m not sure, but I gravitate to some more than others. I think it’s one aspect of paint that can be highly personalized.

 

The compositional framing of your “faces” seems to play an important role in your conceptual framework, as well as the emotive and psychological qualities of the characters you depict. You tend to favor an extreme close-up, tightly cropped style that functions in a way to isolate and trap your figures within the limited landscape of the frame, in a humorous way lending them a sort of existentialist angst. The faces themselves sort of become the landscapes, and their emotional states become the central drama. Why do you choose to tightly frame your figures in this fashion? How do you envision their intellectual and emotional maps playing out?

 

With the close-up, the face becomes the subject. The facial features become the compositional elements themselves, more than just eyes, nose, and mouth. The word “face” is almost synonymous with flatness, but in my case, I often want to create a deep space within the features, depicting both near and far. Sometimes I try to create daydreamy, anguished, or melancholic expressions to entice the viewer into some sort of empathy.

 

That’s interesting that you mention creating a deep space, one that functions on both a macrocosmic and microcosmic level. I suppose in some ways, it’s sort of a clever trope on your part to confound the portraiture vs. landscape, figurative vs. abstract genres and collapse them. Would you say conflating and toying with these genres is part of your interest within the paintings?

 

Yes, I’d say so. I have an interest in this kind of ambiguous space and duality. 

 

Your works seem to be in conversation with Abstract Expressionism. Some of the peaceful, beautiful bars and fields of color within your works remind me of Rothko, and the angular, almost freeform shape heaps call to mind the automatism of Franz Kline, especially after hearing you mention your technique of blowing up small doodles to monstrous sizes. Yet, by inserting the figurative element, you seem to recontextualize and fundamentally poke fun a bit at this tradition. By literally “painting a face” within these compositions, all of the spiritual searching for deeper revelation or form within the images is somewhat removed, though not to say your works aren’t open to a broad array of interpretation. What do you make of the aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism within your works? 

 

I think of those horizontal bars as compressed space, as if you were at eye level to the ground and looking across it, so that a large amount of information could be seen within a small strip, making a stage for some action.  

 

Wedging some eyeballs within what looks like an Expressionistic painting is kind of funny to me, so I guess there are some fun pokes, but I’m just making use of the language that’s out there. I’m referencing our desire and natural tendency to find faces in inanimate things like clouds and abstract paintings, but I hope some “deeper revelations” are still possible.   

 

You participated in a group exhibit at Deitch Projects earlier this year, which described the participating artists as engaging in a sort of “Conceptual Figuration.” Do you think this is an apt term—or how do you view that term as functioning with regards to your work?

 

The title of the show was Conceptual Figures, which is a little more ambiguous, but I’d say a kind of yes and no on whether the term is completely apt. My work is at least partially conceptual in that I work within sets of regulations; however, the work is also very material driven and intuitive in process. 

 

Its nice, then, that the works themselves are premised on this conceptual framework as far as a repeated exploration into a certain subject matter, i.e. your characteristic face-landscapes, though they have such a broad potential for spontaneity and a true love for formal quality such as composition and color. In that sense, do you feel that the works are a bit ironic, as well—on the one hand presenting these lusciously beautiful “abstractions” with faces painted into them? It seems like a very postmodern strategy—sampling ideas from the art historical canon, but with a wink.

 

Some of the shadow paintings might work that way because a trompe-l’oeil shadow will cut through some gestural brushwork, denying the initial reading of the painting as expressionistic. Essentially, it’s like interrupting the flow of the brushstrokes.

 

Your characters’ facial expressions seem to demonstrate an abject, sort of despondent downward gaze that never confronts the viewer—sort of the sad-clown antithesis to confrontational gaze exhibited in an image like “Sharecropper’s Wife” or something of that nature. In some ways, I am reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist angst positing “le regard” or “the look” as a threat to the self in his treatise Being and Nothingness. How do you see your characters’ gazes as functioning? Why do they never address the viewer?

 

The faces usually gaze outside the picture plane, sometimes inwardly and sometimes far off, to create a distance beyond what is portrayed. This preoccupation allows for a less confrontational examination by the viewer and a loose objectification of the shapes that make up the face. I think they would work less as landscapes if there was an awareness of the viewer present. The emotions I try to depict are often those we don’t want to express in front of others, so the viewer is kind of catching them off-guard. The act of looking as the focus is meant to suggest that both the painting and the viewer, who are immersed in the same activity, are perhaps one and the same. I find it interesting how emotions can exist between two gazes, in the geometries produced by their intersecting cones of vision. I would like the viewer to feel caught in a loop of looking at a looker, an idea to raise the awareness of the viewer and allow them to bring something personal to the work.

 

Now that you mention your view on the role of the gaze of your figures, it makes total sense. With a direct confrontational gaze at the viewer, somehow our role as a viewer, per se, would be fundamentally implicated and heightened. With the figures gazing contemplatively into the distance, in these sort of private moments—moments that they don’t want to express in front of others—we are allowed to relax and allow our voyeuristic impulses to take over. It seems like a fundamental choice that makes your paintings’ ambiguity that much stronger.

 

Do you have any other strategies as far as gesture, expression, or composition that you are considering working with? Do you have any plans or ideas for the evolution of your work?

 

Sometimes, my strategy is to build a set of rules and then to find a way to compromise them or cast doubt on what the strategy was in the first place. It’s hard to say how my work will evolve; I work on the paintings one at a time and get excited about new things as they come up. One often informs the next. We’ll see.