Jukka Mäkelä

… Everything else is secondary

As I enter Jukka Mäkelä’s studio, I feel for a moment like I’m being transported from a gloomy grey November day into a sunny afternoon in late winter. Just a few steps from Fiskars old iron works and the shade of aged lindens, this brightly-lit industrial hall conveys me to the middle of a primeval forest, where here and there, the broken branches of fallen firs lay intertwined with snow.

This impression is given by the dozens of paintings, finished and unfinished, large and small, whose thickly painted lines course from one canvas to the next. The sight brings to mind the intensive, abstract expressionist collages that were once so popular on the sleeves of jazz records. Neither is it so distant from the intermingled, silvery trunks of birch groves, whose kinetics make them appear more like a black speckled surface than a three-dimensional space.

Finnish nature, its autumnal and wintry seasons and the tradition of its portrayal, has been linked so often to Mäkelä’s art that there appears no room left for another interpretation. Mäkelä has said that he finds inspiration from everything suggested by nature’s changing lights, colours and lines, thus giving his blessing on these interpretations.

However, the primary objective of a painter is to paint as well as possible. The finished works always differ from their starting point, something easily forgotten when you are in front of them. Recognising hoar-frosted branches or a snow-covered forest clearance in Mäkelä’s paintings is just one possible interpretation.

“…using clumsy tools to work the intractable and fast-drying acrylic, Jukka is completely immersed in controlling this smelly, sticky, extremely messy, synthetic product. His thoughts were far distant from the duskiness or fragrance of Finnish forests or the heritage of the Novembrists.”

Paul Osipow’s description of Mäkelä’s painting offers quite a different picture. In his opinion, it is the actual process of painting that lies at the heart of Mäkelä’s art and the rich and lively surfaces it produces. Everything else, and that which is extraneous to the painting, is secondary.

For this reason Mäkelä’s paintings should be viewed, as it were, passively, allowing the layers of colour, lines and shapes to influence as such without any pre-existing models or interpretations. The central idea behind Mäkelä’s paintings is the making of them. Seeing them in this way, however, requires patience and silence.

The central role of the painting process also explains the forest of paintings that dominates Mäkelä’s studio. Uncertainty is an essential part of this tightrope-walking style of working, the result of which can be a successful painting – or nothing at all. How the work goes, on the other hand, means keeping all your options open. Mäkelä is not scared of making changes to a painting, over-painting or even starting afresh. Painting takes time, but so does waiting to see what the painting will suggest. Also looking at paintings requires time. Painting is indeed a slow art.

Behind every picture lies another picture, and behind every painting lies another painting. Of all the myriad genres of painting, Mäkelä has chosen the still-life for his new works, geometrical shapes grouped loosely on the surface of the canvas. It is futile searching for the landscape’s classical division between sky and ground among his works.

As I enjoy the rich lineal layers of Mäkelä’s paintings and dive into the space that opens up somewhere between the canvas and myself, there comes to mind the monumental still-lifes that Georges Braque produced in his atelier in the middle of the last century. They were almost abstract works in which the master cites himself and in which a shady labyrinth appears to open simultaneously in front and behind the painting surface.

I’m still thinking about the meaning of the painting process to Mäkelä, of all the finished and unfinished paintings and new starts in his studio. I think of all the days and weeks, months and years he has spent and still spends with his paintings. Like Braque, I believe Mäkelä finds his main motifs from his immediate environment, from his studio, from his own art. It seems that for the present the influence of the outside world on his art is, at its deepest, but minimal.

Timo Valjakka