Jyrki Parantainen | Poetic Realities - Ausstellung Berlin

Ausstellung Galerie Persons Projects

Persons Projects proudly presents a collection of Jryki Parantainen’s photographs that focus on his fascination with Poetic Realities. These selected works reflect his interest in how we define what a landscape is. Parantainen states “it’s much more than just a sum of shapes, colors, and light. It’s the universe with all it’s manifestations: grief, longing, dreams, beauty, world politics, environmental disasters, and violence. It’s about the past, the present and the future. The landscape is a canvas permanently open to interpretation”. These works form a collection of perspectives, where words intermingle with each other or rest alone upon the image, usher in new meanings in how we identify, observe or experience a landscape within his conceptual context.
Parantainen uses his life’s journey as his mirror for finding his subjects of interest. These visual metaphors can evolve out from his own personal relationships or a historical ones he discovers, forming a personal library of dreams and disappointments. His photographs go beyond the horizon of where the land, water and sky meet, rather they draw their breath from the space behind the mind’s eye. He says “the horizon is not just a visual convergence of the three elements, but a mental interface, the beginning of a continuously expanding room of dreams and promises”. They offer homage to forgotten places where dreams are born and futures lost. There offerings to those spaces we think of as in betweens. The mysteries of imperfections don’t come and go they are. Parantainen uses them as his pool for his thoughts. He swims into the unknown as another way of sinking into the present. These photographs reflect a poetic undercurrent that can be both beautiful as well as ominous. He writes “everyday life can be unsure, questionable, no less than threatening. On the other hand, disabled life can always contain a lot of beauty, which we are simply not aware of.” Therefore, imperfections and their opposites are in his mind the same at the end of the day. “Placed together they are a poem about reality.” Parantainen sense for craftsmanship play a key role in his creative process. His method is his own design to push the photograph more towards painting in terms of the logic and aesthetics.
These photographs serve as stages for thought and personal reflections. Words and sentences inscribed on the images multiply new levels of meaning. They can politicize or poeticize. I use the words to create a new identity for the landscape to show the way I have observed and experienced it—to increase the conceptual content.
His works reveal both the horrors and the sublime that reminds all of us of the humor and its absurdities that we call the humanity of life.