In her B/looming exhibition Milla Aska works with states and zones situated between material, body, and mind. Aska uses composition and brushwork to evoke tensions and movement in her paintings. The shapes and colour surfaces in these abstract, intensely physical works are in a constant shifting state. When observing the paintings and giving them time, the liminal qualities of Aska’s paintwork become tangible. As the image unfolds and reveals itself, a distance is created for the viewer. It is as if she succeeds in capturing a blur, a haziness – an outright mystery.

Aska’s art does not give us answers, rather, it centres on states of mind, gaps and wonderment. Instead of nailing down the motif, she wields the energies that it brings with it. She works with masses and their movements across the picture surface, while also harnessing and directing the momentum that she sets in motion. Her paintings have a charge and a power, but the tone is calm and controlled. In these energies there is no place for disquiet. Aska slowly brings us closer, to admire and to celebrate the enigma. She seems to fashion a kind of lens or aperture through which we are able to see things that would otherwise be beyond our perception.

In her new suite of paintings, light is an important element. She works with thin layers of paint. Each one gives the shapes greater definition, while adding depth, lustre, shadow and contrast to the growing colour saturation. Later in the working process, a variety of graininess also arises in the image, or a kind of noise that adds a layer of entropy over the whole thing. A vibrating shimmer arises, as if the ether in her image were filled with life and movement.

Aska’s art also brings to mind photography, and especially how the technology and the mechanics of the camera came to introduce a new way of viewing time and motion in visual art. Blurred photographs, where the subject was moving or the optics were out of focus, had new properties that gave the picture an added mood and feeling. This became the gateway to Impressionist painting, which also finds echoes in Aska’s diffuse, suggestive paintwork. But her paintings are not looking at the landscape, the people, or the way that light is reflected in the water of the city. Instead, their focus is the optic nerve or our capacity for seeing and interpreting. She creates a slow, evocative nebulousness in which the gaze occasionally gets to pause and stand motionless at its very edge. Like letting the eye become accustomed to darkness. The observing eye may catch a glint, a magnetic field, or heavenly bodies and beings in motion. With their fantastic, almost dreamlike magnetism, they reach out, so as to come closer, to come into being.

Markus Åström
Curator

Milla Aska

Milla Aska (b. 1993) lives and works in Helsinki. She completed her master’s degree in the painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2020. Aska has had solo exhibitions at: HAM, Helsinki; Titanik, Turku; and The Aine Art Museum, Tornio. She has also participated in several group exhibitions, including at: Kohta, Helsinki; Outo Olo, Helsinki; Kogo Gallery, Tartu, Estonia and Galerie Anhava, Helsinki. Aska’s works are included in the collections of Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), Kiasma, Saastamoinen, the Finnish Art Society, The Aine Art Museum, and the Finnish National Gallery.

millaaska.com

The exhibition has been supported by

Oskar Öflund Stiftelse, The Paulo Foundation and The Finnish Heritage Agency.