[gallery]
I’ve been remiss – other duties have called me away from my sacred charge of talking up specific works and individual contributors to our groundbreaking mega-artpack MIST1015 back at the end of October (to say nothing of earlier releases I have yet to discuss), but I have good excuses… some of these duties have involved further and ongoing Mistigris projects. But some subjects are timely and are left idle at the risk of irrelevance!

Antti Minkkinen (aka Unseen) contributed two of his paintings (and an ANSI logo for his scene project PEN15 whose name I am regrettably unable to satisfyingly explain) to the artpack, and now (and indeed, since November 25th… and until December 20th, so you still have a chance) you can see some of his other paintings hanging on a wall in an art gallery. That is, if you happen to be situated in or near the town of Tapiola in Finland. (If I know the computer underground, definitely that applies to a few of you!)

The exhibition has a website whose blurb I was invited to translate:

“This exhibition is of my most recent works. I rarely sketch during the process and I hardly think anything while painting. I never pick themes consciously while working but I often find myself exploring similar topics. I’m interested in honesty, authenticity and humour, and try to search for beauty, as mundane as it may sound. I want my art to, at some primitive level, narrate my experience with authenticity.”

Antti Minkkinen is a fine artist from Espoo. He has graduated from Vapaa Taidekoulu with a BFA degree majoring in painting. He works mainly as a painter but also in other medias like sculpture, video and digital art.

This exhibition was also the subject of a bit of media coverage which I, with the generous assistance of Google Translate, have tried to render comprehensible to non-speakers of the notoriously obtuse Finno-Ugric language group… with some middling success:

Antti Minkkinen reflects on the challenge of the concept of beauty
by Anneli Tuominen-Halomo

Artist Antti Minkkinen mostly paints, but also makes sculptures, videos and multimedia. His paintings raise a smile – there on the Studio Aarni wall next to a portrait are a couple of still lives of flowers. “The face started to look like an evening rose, so I painted it between two tables covered in flowers,” the artist explains.

The exhibition includes Minkkinen’s latest paintings, from which eyes, noses or tongues may emerge: Minkkinen has used “everything that can be found on the floor” to make the protrusions. “People have a dull perception of beauty - I have deliberately chosen random themes, but I see them manifesting the same topics.”

Through a lens of his interest in honesty, authenticity and humour, he has begun to explore beauty. Inspiration is all around – when he sees colors running together from garbage in the gutter, he remembers the shades and hues, then subsequently applies the color scheme to a painting.

The paintings in this show are all quite small in size. “A small canvas concentrates an idea down to be stronger.” Minkkinen says he makes quite a lot of drawings and some of the paintings emerge from the sketches. He always carries a sketchbook to take notes in case he sees an interesting subject of study, but with mobile phone use on the rise he finds more often a quick digital photograph is made for reference instead. “The works are often syntheses. If a part isn’t working, paint over it – you can’t afford to fall in love with your own work.”

For his own influences, Antti Minkkinen points at the Dutch Karel Appel, as well as Espoo visual artists Tycho Elon and teacher Tarmo Paunu.

Antti Minkkinen is an Espoo-based artist who graduated from the Free Art School in 2012. He is up for election as the representative for the Painters’ Union board.

The exhibition of Antti’s paintings at Studio Aarni in Heikki’s Square, Tapiola, will continue until 20 December.“

The photograph came from the article; the ANSI logo and the painting of the yelling man are from MIST1015, while the pair of bearded men are an adaptation of another of his submissions to MIST1015, tweaked by myself in an (unsuccessful) attempt to come up with some interesting visual effects (colour cycling, in this case) for the MIST1015 promotional video.

Unseen isn’t the only Mistigris contributor to exhibit his works in a gallery context; he probably isn’t even the first. (At least one of us is currently curating a gallery space!) Someday, we hope to curate and mount a textmode art retrospective gallery exhibition ourselves! (That’s an aspiration that’s been in the works since 2004, pre-dating any notion of reforming Mistigris, and which actually set everything that followed in motion.) Stay tuned for more highlights from our recent (and distant) back stacks, plus shout-outs to ongoing achievements by Mist folks past and present!