‘Last Lick’, ‘Hit’ or ‘If you work in marketing or advertising kill yourself’, the titles of Rannva Kunoy’s latest body of work are strong and suggestive. Her paintings themselves are quite the opposite: they hint at a meaning but are never clearly prescriptive.
The paintings of Rannva Kunoy hit you immediately, but then seem to keep slipping away. Kunoy borrows images from art history, high and low, which serve as a basic composition and are further morphed and manipulated into a subject that refuses to be definite. The image remains in a constant state of flux. What seems concrete and revealed at first glance, becomes ungraspable at the next.
Rannva Kunoy hints at forms and subjects, but also at depths and the photographic. The canvas gradually appears more ominous as the underlying grey tones grow more prominently visible. The resulting painting eludes any single reading; it can look like a head or a still life with flowers. Words that can or cannot be read are floating on the painting and, again, refusing to give meaning. There is a statement underlying these paintings which is intentionally full of contradictions. The process is as important as the composition, which can be as important as a historical reference or a subject.
Rannva
Kunoy’s paintings have an immediate illusion to space. Although there is no trace of a
texture, the translucency of the paint seems to suggest a third dimension. The
depth beneath the many thin flat layers of paint keeps the viewer in suspense
by a constant teasing, but also in doubt because one is never sure of what one
is actually seeing.
Pilvi Takala bends the
unwritten rules of our everyday life. She uses herself as artistic tool by
diving into everyday situations masqueraded as an office trainee or more
recently as the Real Snow White. Takala is interested in belief systems
which affect everyone by laws, statutes and rules of behavior. She also blurs
the boundaries between the artist and the audience by making the participants
unknowing actors in her videos. In Takala’s film fairytale turns into a story
of extreme and absurd control when her Snow White is seen as a threat
to the perfect image of Disney’s Snow White. Ultimately, Takala’s works
encourage us to question the conventions that we act upon.
