Leena Halonen

Paintings

"Sonnets"

Gallery Kivipankki 28th September - 12th October 2003 Jämsä, Finland
Works of the exhibition

Dear visitor,

The minor sea horse in his silver cage is the key work of my "Sonnets" exhibition. I brought this dried sea horse from Fisterra, also called Finisterra, the end of the land. Fisterra is the western-most point in Galicia, northwest Spain. When you walk quite to the tip of the small peninsula, your eyes will only see the open sea all around the field of vision.
I learned to know oil damages at the coasts of Galicia, caused by the shipwreck of the oil tanker "La Prestige". The vulnerability of nature was concrete. Men in white overalls were washing rough cliffs with power washers, but their job seemed to be hopeless: how could they clean every single stone or cliff in the end? Especially when there is a wreck on the bottom of the sea, many miles deep, pouring out more and more pollutants into the sea.
My journey in Galicia, June 2003, launched a mental process, which finally lead me to this exhibition. What is the role of oil in our fates? How do greed and lack of responsibility affect our future? There is much more in human beings than just brutality. That is why I wanted to avoid crude means of painting when approaching my subject. I chose Shakespeare's sonnets to counterbalance the scene. They represent beauty. Beauty belongs to human beings and derives from them. Sonnets are poems, often also songs. You can read, hear and - why not - see them, too.
The most developed senses of man are sight and hearing. When a person observes his physical environment, he automatically divides objects into two categories: human-made and nature-made. As one always knows that a person made the painting, this consciousness is always included in the interpretation of the work. This means, we try to observe possible points in common with either nature or human-made creations in nature.
We could approach paintings just like music: search properties that correspond, not to the external habits of our eyes, but to the internal reflections, desires and needs. This is what I try to message in my painting.