The Touch seeks out and opens up the meaningful, fertile aspects of painting, its subjectivities and self-referentialities. It is about the nuances and accents in the internal logic of the painterly act. How an answer to how and why a painting is made and how that painting is experienced is articulated and actualized through painterly acts.

The core and starting point of the exhibition project is the word ‘touch’. Touch is linked to and openly dares us to do all that it promises, coming closer to all that it can never attain. Envisaging the experiential nature of touch and painting is bound up with an impossible ethic. They ask how we are perpetually in motion in the world, seeking and perpetually losing equilibrium.

The exhibition project is about strategies of getting closer and being close, about that exceptionally individual feeling and the various depths and degrees of experience, which are nevertheless at the same time universally intelligible and shareable. About how the painting is present – here and now in a permeable, mutual viewing experience.

The aim is to create an intense, yet specific group exhibition of paintings, which does not start off or take shape from sheer quantity, but with and through the individual painting. There are relatively few works, but they have all been made especially for this exhibition. The exhibition becomes a reality as you go around it, since different works are on display and a different emphasis can be seen in each exhibition space.

The Touch was first shown at the Aine Art Museum in Tornio on 12.10–18.11.2018. The exhibition went on to Seinäjoki Art Hall, where a new selection of paintings is on show for the period 23.2–28.4.2019. The Seinäjoki configuration is being exhibited partly at the same time as the third and final component of the tour now at Sinne (12.4–26.5.2019).

The works currently on display have been influenced by the experiences accumulated during the tour and by their effect both on the individual artists’ own work and on the work they do together. A major contribution is also made by Sinne’s own space, which opens onto the street and the outside world, and in so doing challenges established ways of hanging painting exhibitions. The exhibition project as a whole has been produced by Pro Artibus Foundation.

The exhibition artists are Ville Andersson, Eeva-Riitta Eerola, Ilari Hautamäki and Heidi Lampenius. The exhibition has been curated by Mika Hannula & Juha-Heikki Tihinen.

During the final exhibition period there will be two events for the public at Sinne. The first is at 15:00–16:30 on Saturday, April 13, when Mika Hannula will present the exhibition and the book The Touch that provides the background to the series of exhibitions.
The second event for the public is at 15:00–16:30 on Saturday, April 27. This discussion bringing together the entire series of exhibitions will be started off by the exhibition’s curators and the artists Eeva-Riitta Eerola, Ilari Hautamäki and Heidi Lampenius.

Image: Ilari Hautamäki, Zero Gravity, 2019, 140 x120 cm, acrylic and oil on canvas.