Wednesday, May 4, 2011

BEAUTY: Painting--Jarmo Mäkilä

Finnish artist Jarmo Mäkilä scares me... in a good way. Well, perhaps in a real way as well. The subjects of his realist/surrealist works are full of menace and violence. The gangs of seemingly innocent boys who roam the countryside and streets delight in setting fires and killing animals to the beat of a drum, while his adults linger in loneliness and despair in squalid rooms. All the while, packs of dogs populate the periphery, bringing an additional element of instability and wildness that could erupt at any moment, sending civilization off a cliff. Powerful work.

I do not speak Finnish, but with the help of some on-line translators, the titles at the bottom are, I suspect, the closest I could get. Two remain untranslated because I am not sure they actually have titles. In Finnish, "Teoksen nimi" means "Book title."


Top to bottom: Babelkoiranhuone (Babel Dog Room); Kolkko Leikki (Bleak Play); Levitaatio (Levitation); Miehuuskoe (Graduate); Teoksen Nimi 1; Teoksen Nimi 2; Urheilutunti (Sports Hour)
http://www.jarmomakila.com/index.html

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