Triton - Study of Harmony by Mika Vesalahti

Throughout a career as a painter, I have been thinking about the relationship between painting and reality. This includes questions of the political nature of painting and its ability to convey a message. My aim is therefore to summarise in a series of paintings the tensions of our time, in the midst of which the individual is distressed and at a loss.

The starting point for my series of paintings is the relationship between painting and music. In musical art, the tritone interval has been used to depict conflicting tensions, violence, suffering.
Wassily Kandinsky sought a relationship between music and harmonies of colour in his work. The colours resonate in a field of spirituality. The composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote his thesis Harmonielehre. However, as we move into modern times, art’s aspirations to spirituality and harmony have been called into question. Our world is characterised by tearing contradictions in the form of violent power struggles, the destruction of nature and climate change.

The question is: is it possible to achieve harmony in art (in the world)? Can painting deal with the violence of the world, bring conflicts together, liberate the repressed and make the process holistic? I am interested in this element of freedom in painting. Perhaps the timeliness of painting comes from its ability to suggest and create layering rather than direct representation, much like music. The tensions of our time, the hopes and threats, can be found in the alternation between masses of colour and thin layers, at the intersection of emptiness and fullness.

The paintings in the series form a whole, with the smaller paintings acting as alphabets for the idiosyncratic grammar of the larger paintings.

/Mika Vesalahti/


Mika Vesalahti (b. 1967) is a painter who lives and works in Helsinki and Viljandi. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki in 1992. Internationality is essential for him, both in the form of exhibitions and residencies. Since 1995, Vesalahti has held solo exhibitions in Finland, Estonia, and Germany, and has participated in group exhibitions in France, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates. He is a member of the Finnish Artists’ Association.

Supporters: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Viljandi City Government