Anna Alapuro

Details give birth to unity

The visual character of different locations has been a recurring theme in Anna Alapuro’s works for a long while. She seizes countries and cities. In her works, she condenses cultural environments from manor houses to industrial areas.

She highlights details in these locations. The choices of pictorial motifs don’t follow a pattern. Alapuro recreates the spirit of a location by following her own intuition and experience of how the place looked and felt, or maybe smelled and sounded. She conveys the viewer her own version of St. Petersburg, Mänttä or India.

The power of the details chosen is in their broad variance. One picture might include a bridge, the next one a detail of a textile and a third the metal cover of a street inlet. The scale of the motifs varies greatly, as does the nature of the details. Sometimes the details have been picked from decorations, sometimes they depict structures. They include dishes and logos, animal figures and clothing.

Some of the motifs aren’t immediately recognizable. Small details in particular become aesthetically almost abstract. The forms and colours of things come only partially from reality; yet in Alapuro’s hands, they grow into an image of an entire country or region.

One must keep in mind, however, that Alapuro doesn’t collect symbols, nor does she create them. Her expression is multistranded, pictures have no simple explanations and they don’t necessarily mean anything. They are a piece of reality picked out by Alapuro, and they contain as much truth as we are willing to believe.

The charm of the series of works is based on a perspective that is simultaneously observing and genuinely excited. One can sense the joy of discovery in the pictures, but the whole is still always analytical and balanced.

Alapuro’s works consist of large series of pictures she has created using different graphic art techniques. Many of the pictures are uniform in size, but in some series, the size varies. Alapuro often hangs the more uniform series in regular patterns, while the fresh India-themed series consisting of works of different sizes is arranged on the wall into an irregular group. Some of the series have been displayed in frames, others without a frame under a sheet of glass. The thick intaglio paper used in the works gives them a personal, material feel.

Over the years, Alapuro has used different graphic art techniques. She is known particularly as a user of lithography, carborundum and serigraphy. Recently, her repertoire has been complemented by various ways of making monotypes. Her works are rarely black and white in terms of colour palette; this is mainly restricted to lithography. Otherwise, her characteristic features are strong, clean colours and intensive, smooth hues. The nature of Alapuro’s motifs is reflected in the colours of her works, and their atmosphere is easy to grasp.

If one takes individual works out of a series and inspects them separately, the differences between them are so big that it’s difficult to understand how smoothly they become part of a uniform series. One picture features electronics, another handicrafts, a third a hint of a building and a fourth an animal figure carved in stone. The chosen motifs are different, and almost anything in the atmosphere of the locations is a fitting subject, except for people. Alapuro also doesn’t do landscapes per se. Some pictures may include hints of sky or the horizon, sometimes the trees may form an unintentional landscape-like element. Sometimes the motif requires a broader perspective. In such situations, Alapuro reduces it into two dimensions in a way that distances the viewer. That way, the work doesn’t support straightforward interpretations and doesn’t feel documentary.

The interesting thing is that Alapuro doesn’t illustrate our images of locations. She doesn’t highlight the clearest or most recognizable elements, or if she does, it is the key work of the series the viewer can use as a starting point while trying to find a path into the world experienced by Alapuro. She introduces us to a new perspective to the motif that might take some time to perceive. Colourful aesthetical series of works can be viewed as almost abstract studies of form, without regard to their motifs. The location and atmosphere and the aesthetic of the location become visible only when one spends time with the pictures.

Alapuro’s works contain varying stylistic elements that take the viewer through layers of the history of art. At times, the atmosphere is almost informalistic, at times closer to pop art. Some works have impressionistic shades, others the straightforwardness of New Objectivity. Stylistic play is part of the works’ charm. Varying techniques also affect the aesthetic. The technique used in the new India-themed works is monotype. It creates practically unique works whose colour intensity, if possible, is even more impressive than in the previous series. This fits in well with the atmosphere of India that Alapuro conveys.

A motif repeated in several works is the profile structure of a tin roof. Strong, plain works say something about India one wouldn’t immediately think of. Yet, the cheap building material and the light strongly reflected by it feel like a clear and essential part of India after Alapuro has shown them to us as part of her work.

Alapuro doesn’t tell stories or make documentaries, but does something even more essential. She is able to relay to us information she has first pondered on and processed, then turned into a visual form. The visual space that surrounds us is numbing at times. There is a huge number of stimuli, and the world around us becomes ordinary, no matter where you are. That’s why it’s valuable to have someone highlight their own version of it; to show us how we too could look and what we could see.

Veikko Halmetoja, 2020
Translation Mikko Alapuro

THE REBIRTH OF HANDIWORKS

A lace curtain, a crocheted rug and a couch pillow have turned into pictures whose source the viewer can mentally trace back to a grandmother’s house or a bric-a-brac store. In her new works, graphic artist Anna Alapuro presents interpretations of a vanishing Finnish reality. She has picked out distinctive details that have more to tell than first meets the eye. Some of us can still find these objects at our homes, some remember carrying them to the trash dump from the house of a deceased relative. Even in old detached houses, few people eat meatballs these days; cooked potatoes have given way to pasta, and handiworks to Ikea.

Alapuro has immortalized crocheted loops and woven threads, whose visuality stems from a chain of generations of women. The ornaments in these objects of everyday use have been inspired by nature, and they replicate shapes whose variations are familiar from all over the world. This creates a path that starts from plants, and branches into primitive ornamental patterns, architecture, art and craftsmanship. The same path can be followed in Alapuro’s artistic output. She has worked organic shapes that reveal cells, blossoms and seeds. The sunny colours further emphasize the natural thematic. Previously, Alapuro abstracted the visual themes so strongly that the works became decorative. They had been inspired by nature, just like the ornamental patterns that date back hundreds of years.

These new works are not decorative; the ornaments themselves have become the focus. With its sincere pursuit for beauty, the realm of handiworks offers a limitless visual archive. Alapuro shows devotion in her treatment of a subject matter that modernism resented. She follows the old tracks loop by loop, mosaic by mosaic. Her works emanate with understanding and humane warmth even for the more banal models of handiworks that have been passed down from one generation to another. The ornamentation of a woven pillow becomes alive in a new way when it is replicated as art. With the changes in material and context, the replication of an ornament is reduced to naturalistic observation, which in itself is free from decorativeness.

The changes become apparent after the scholarship period in Villa Karo, Benin, in the spring of 2003. The same basic approach is still there, but these works were born out of clearly recognizable starting points. Alapuro herself refers to the “Afterimages” series of works as “lookalike pictures”. The topic here is the African visual reality. Nature, textiles and everyday objects have blended into a series of pictures that is bound together by a common aesthetic. As is typical of Alapuro, these works do not share a strong common denominator; instead, their serial nature stems from creative parallelisms. This gives her the freedom to tackle extremely diverse subjects: The rhythmical surface of a lace curtain could be related to the light-reflecting glass wall of a modern office complex.

In her African themes, Alapuro discovered the design of everyday life. She created pictures of decorative objects as well as objects of everyday use, paying special attention to their aesthetics, such as the patterns of a fabric or the shape of a lamp. This sets them clearly apart from her early black-and-white lithographies, where she aestheticized the use of objects. The return of figurativeness nonetheless forms a link to the old prints from the 1980’s.

Anna Alapuro is known for her skillful employment of the carborundum technique. These days, she complements its softness with serigraphy. As of late, she has also returned to working lithography, which she has been teaching for years. Mastering old techniques requires the tenacity and care of a craftsman. It is easy to imagine that in moving from the creation of a picture to processing it, Alapuro feels kinship with lace-makers, African textile printers and rock sculptors of the Antiquity.Alapuro illustrates man’s eternal need to create beauty around himself. It is a consistent choice for an artist who has not been ashamed of her own pursuit of beauty.

Veikko Halmetoja, 2006
Translation Mikko Alapuro

I may take a carpet and lift it to the wall by making a print out of it. Carefully, I trace every stitch of it. I am fascinated by the abstract in our everyday surroundings, as in textiles or in the shapes of kitchen utensils. The subject matter, however, becomes more obscure when I make a picture by the means of printing. Some familiarity yet remains. By looking at these pictures viewers may find some points in common with other worlds of meaning.

The series called Afterimages was born after my residence at Villa Karo in Benin in the spring of 2003. Portrayals of familiar everyday phenomena. Stars in the sky, an elaborate hairdo, village dogs or patterned fabrics. There is something to be found everywhere, everything can be used. Simple, ordinary matters waiting to be observed. I have enjoyed making these works and I have tried to bring out how difference can be enriching and uniting, among people as well as in pictures.