All the questions that are never answered?

Triinu Soikmets

Before meeting Mika Vesalahti at his exhibition “Triton – Study of Harmony” in Viljandi, Rüki Gallery, I had to make my own study of tritone interval. It appeared, for example, that Leonard Bernstein used this disharmonic technique in his musical “West Side Story” where one of the characters, Tony, is occupied with complicated feelings that are reflected in the composition of the aria “Maria”. Tritone is about creating and releasing tension, about raising questions that need to be answered... but when?

At least during the following conversation Mika Vesalahti answered some questions about his creation, still giving the viewer an opportunity to interpret it with free will. Or is there any free will at all?

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Your paintings – not only on this exhibition, but on previous as well – look not only a little bit messy, but very messy…

This is your interpretation, I don´t think so… Okay, this is my thought: we are living in this world that is very violent and distorted, so this is the task of an artist to capture this element to the works. Because this is what art is born from – describing or mirroring our time we are living in. It means that painting should have a rough surface. So, this is the meaning, the background of… you called it messiness… or even fleshiness.

Yes, fleshiness, even better. When moving backwards in time some years ago the first time I got to know your paintings was in Pärnu. You had a very big exhibition there, in Pärnu Uue Kunsti Muuseum (the Museum of New Art), curated by Mark Soosaar, it was based on Dante Alighieri’s „Divine Comedy”.

Mark made this kind of interpretation that they are directly related to the “Comedy”, because of the title of the exhibition – “Hell’s God Machine and Painting Paradise”. Dantean atmosphere comes from the world, where’s always two sides. But anyway, I had a year later a private exhibition at Dante’s House in Florence. So, I was happy that you made this connection. Also, an art critic found this connection to Dantean world in Helsingin Sanomat, so it really means something.

I have read Dante´s poem, and I would say that this exhibition illustrated it quite well, no matter if it was made intentionally or unintentionally. You also had this fleshiness and messiness there – I did a big sin, touched a painting and felt a liquid there, it was still soft.

Well, it’s a living thing…

In Pärnu you had different techniques; drawings, paintings, mostly in very dark color, but they still had touch of gold. Talking about Hell – some people say it’s fun there, enjoyable, while Heaven is boring. Estonian graphic artist Eduard Wiiralt also had a famous work titled “Hell”. I can see that you used the same atmosphere in this exhibition, but it is so much more colorful, and the first thing I thought was: “wow, this is so beautiful!” From hell to harmony – what has been your path?

I think I will try to avoid psychological explanations. As much as religious. Before starting to paint the series, I always make decisions about the colors, like I did two years ago: this time I am using more (bright) colors, red, yellow, orange, light backgrounds and opposites of thin and thick layers. There’s no philosophy at all. It was a decision based on esthetical reasons. I wanted to capture a lighter feeling for this series, because the content is so heavy. For me it’s like a musical piece, the symphony consists of several parts and different moods. I remember how Sibelius always changed his style for the next symphony. I felt I had to renew my style. Like life itself is changing all the time.

Harmony – could we say that it is like a balance between heaven and hell, beauty and ugliness…

Yes, of course. Like lightness and darkness and vice versa; without the shadows there would not be any lights, so it’s very easy. And like music, music always contains silence, being contains emptiness. Ugliness is very important, because beauty without counter force means only stupid esthetics… There is some irony in that tittle „Studies of Harmony “, because there is no harmony in this world.

We were talking about the tritone interval – basically it is disharmony.

Yes, when we are thinking of a composer like Mozart, there is always that idea of beauty and harmony. But then there are some composers who are using disharmony to emphasize harmony, dissonance against consonance, like Richard Wagner who started one of his famous operas with disharmony.

So, the feeling is that you don’t exactly know what is happening, where you are going now, it’s an annoying feeling, because you need to know more, you need the answers. Tritone is used when the composers want to describe violence or difficult, contradictory feelings, pain and suffering.

During the Middle Ages it was considered as satanic kind of music, the devil’s interval, like witchcraft was forbidden and so on. Was there more harmony during the Middle Ages than nowadays?

I think there were certain understanding about world order based of ancient Creek philosophy, music of the spheres reflecting the Heavenly order… You can find that from Dante… or Giotto.

You mentioned Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde”, Tristan cord…

That specific opera changed everything in our culture, in all art forms… So, it was only one cord causing this effect, that is so remarkable! Schonberg, Mann, Bunuel, Dali – they were all influenced by that.

The meaning of it is to create a tension that should be released eventually. Because if it remains unresolved, hanging in the air, it is unhealthy and not a sign of good taste.

It is like modulation from minor to major… You must have relief, like in the end of “Tristan and Isolde” – after five hours of growing tension you can find the solution for everything. It’s the question of only couple of tones.

In this exhibition – are you trying to build up some kind of narrative here, too, a story like in an opera composition?

Well, the narrative, or should I say the rhythm is essential for me. For example, there should be some small paintings because others are so huge. There is a certain narrative line: at first, there’s an introduction, and the basic theme is coming afterwards, much like in classical music form, repeated again, and then there is the ending phrase. Because of the dynamics there are these small works. They are like the cells from the organ or alphabets from larger sentences.

But if you should divide your works – which of them creates the tension and which releases it? Or are they all in one?

I guess that the viewer should feel it. The main work in this series has more color, more elements – the stripes, details of organs etc. The movement in these paintings are also important as all the paintings are based on stillness contra movement, sharp edges and sprayed parts, all creating a distance between the layers. There should be deepest possible depth.

For myself, if I should choose between creating and releasing the tension, this painting seems like a letter, because it is like splashing, exploding, something like raining down. But on the other side, if I am thinking about creating the tension – the smaller one “the Heart of golden brown” fits.

I think that this painting just exploited… or then jus melting away!

This is the basic color I use always because I love these earth colors, but at the same time there’s some organic matter, some fleshiness coming through the landscape.

And from next painting we can find a reference to Albert Oehlen, a German painter…

My style is quite much based on German new tradition of painting which means strong gestures combined with deep content. There are these modern classics like Baselitz and others… The Neue Wilde group. One of them is Oehlen and some of his works are based on music, so it gave me an idea to continue my series. That’s the reason I am quoting him in the title of the work. I am also borrowing these stripes, “notations” from him spreading them all over the canvases in this series.

And when looking at them together we could talk about creating and releasing the tension – we can see a small heart bumping, like coming out of the body, through the skin, like really wanting to say something, and then it is coming out: boom! The next pair of paintings are also talking about the contradictions, even more directly…

Ah, you mean those two… There is a small painting called Laputa, the mythological cloud city. From there you can find this juxtaposition between the thick color at the top and “empty” bottom. And on the other one I have used a figure – the only one you can find from this series – borrowed from the painting of a romantic period, some kind of mythological hero. I feel that in our world one individual is struggling against masses of things, all this knowledge of wars, violence and death, climate change.

There’s lot of things we can’t take control of, human beings are so small in the middle of strong powers. From this painting you can also find this contrast between light and darkness, with a tar-like mass at the top and empty bottom corner.

For me it remains of Johan Köler’s „The cursing of Lorelei”. Köler was actually from Viljandimaa and we have statue of him here in Viljandi.

Yes, I know him! Probably the original figure I copied here was also from the 19th century painting.

You also mentioned climate change…

I meant those big threats around us, the annoying feeling that something bigger is happening and we just can’t control that.

But in the context of violence – is climate change more about violent forces of nature or the violence made by humans against the nature?

Against nature, of course, we are those who are destroying it, causing these things to happen, we are guilty here.

But we also have natural disasters that do not come from us. When we imagine that nature itself has its will, its own aims – why would nature create something like that? Is it also like creating harmony through violence?

I wouldn’t go that far to this philosophy; it is some sort of naive animism. I’m talking about only human behavior and thinking, the consequences coming from that. It is not so interesting for me to think about nature in itself, there’s no morality in animals or plants (it is a human formation!), they just exist. We are not innocent, we are all using some ideologies thinking through them, we are not pure creatures. We have all lost our innocence and the cause of how we are acting, what kind of choices we are making. I am so much a Marxist - probably Freudian also - that I think the economy, environment and social facts are leading our acts very often, so there’s no such thing as free will, as we people as a consumers believe.

You also mentioned the political side of the exhibition. Can art make our world a better place? When politicians come to see your exhibition, would it make them a better person?

Of course not. Maybe earlier I thought so. I used the media pictures as a starting point for my paintings: polluted nature, pictures from war, about victims... Probably there was idealism behind the idea that it would change something. The idea went like this: somebody who can watch these paintings is shocked somehow and after that will be better person changing his/her attitude and thinking, acting and consuming more responsible way in the future… Never happening.

One of the starting points to this series comes from Kandinsky (from whom I copied one painting to the series) – in the beginning of 20^th century there was such a big belief that art will change our mentality, spirituality was a leading theme for artists of the area. The painting, music, and arts in general were together creating this spirituality.

So, you are a pessimist?

In that way, yes, naïve pessimist combined with weak faith for the future. Or is this distorted optimism? In any case the meaning of culture is much deeper. It’s like a language, you must learn the alphabet to understand how to use it for expression. The culture is like a mirror in front of us. And from art and culture you can find connections between the things: our common history, politics, thinking, the future… The culture is like a network underneath our being.

But in this main painting you are using media pictures – eyes, lips and ears?

No, they are not from the media. They are small details of our body, they are related to our senses – seeing, tasting and hearing. They are combining these senses with haptics. As you said, you touched one of the paintings… That´s whole idea!

I have also glued here a carboard candle that my son Matthias made in kindergarten when he was younger. He said to me in the studio that I should use it because it has the same colors as that painting has. And it was true! It is like some flame of innocence, same time microworld and macroworld together. Usually, I am removing all the imaginary figures and tiny detailing because it makes the painting look so boringly naive (I don’t want to fall for their temptation) but here you will find some small figures and details. It presents self-conscious innocence!

And here, on the other painting, we can see a hand as a touching sense, a glove…

Yes, a caveman touch, a sign of artists presence…

And in the other painting there’s testicles as a reference to Freudian-Lacan vibe, and a skull of a father. Probably it is about castration. And the Holy Spirit is spread above like minced meat. I like it: it is like Holy Trinity in a fleshy way!

At the same time the painting is about Ukrainian people who are like castrated by Russian attack, killing innocent people whose organs are blowing and spreading like a mashed meat.

We were talking about Russian attack – and close to Russian border there is Narva, where your other exhibition is opened right now in NART gallery. With or without war, it has always been a place full of tension. How did you feel there compared to Viljandi, just even based on energy?

It really is a different type of place, and I felt the tension, indeed. It was my work partner Jaakko Autio´s idea to work together. He has very nice sound work where both Russian, Estonian and Finnish speaking people are singing the national anthem „My Fatherland, Mu isamaa“all sung in Estonian. Individual voice comes from separate speakers and together they sound like a choir, amazing technical result. So that’s like creating harmony between the people and the place uniting opposites into a whole.

He calls his artistic approach with the philosophical term radical empathy. It describes my attitude as well. There I have a big scale painting with a small detail about a victim of Finnish civil war execution. Radical empathy is needed in our world of contradictions.

Narva is really the right place to have such an exhibition.

How were you working? Were the paintings before and the sound solution come after or did happen side by side, hand in hand?

We met in residency in eastern Finland, close to Russian border. At first, I was sceptic about his “modern techniques”, using AI for example, but then I became interested in it more and more. We found out that we have many kinds of similar ideas and targets in our art: searching for deeper meaning instead of expressing personal feelings or momentary emotions.

I think instead of famous and fashionable questions of individuality or identity, we need more this kind of overviews in contemporary art.