The exhibition, which is being shown for the first time in Frankfurt/M / outside of Konstanz, presents the results of a three-month artist residency that Jukka Rusanen spent in Konstanz in spring 2018. Born in Jyväskylä in 1980, Jukka Rusanen studied fine arts at the Turku School of Fine Arts and at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Today he lives and works in Finland's seventh largest city, Lahti.
The artist's works are part of all of Finland's top museum collections, including the Finnish State Art Collection, the Helsinki Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum KIASMA. Since the gallery was founded in Konstanz, Jukka Rusanen has been represented in Germany and Switzerland by Lachenmann Art in close cooperation. His intense and at the same time extremely fragile and filigree work is an expression of a connection between aesthetics and conception that is unparalleled in contemporary painting.
The often large-format canvas works are striking due to the mostly pasty application of intense oil paints on a flat background. They show highly abstracted quotes from the most important art historical past, elements that Jukka Rusanen deconstructs and alienates in a uniquely sensitive, almost poetic way. All that remains of the example of the holy martyr Sebastian, who is tied to a tree and pierced by arrows, is a dynamic gesture of suffering. The pasty style underlines the emotional intensity of the expression. The alienation created by strong abstraction turns the quote into a nebulous trace of the past, so that the effect of the painting is reduced to a pathos of a gesture reaching towards heaven, which leaves the viewer shuddering in awe. Although Jukka Rusanen's works far exceed the limits of figuration, the movement of his body is still clearly felt, frozen in a single gesture of color. Jukka Rusanen creates some of the oil paintings with his bare hands alone, dispensing with brushes altogether in favor of a highly dynamic visibility of the creative process.
