Jyrki Parantainen

Photo & Co., Turin
Through July 1

This colorful cycle of photographic works, by Jyrki Parantainen entitled Fire, represents this Finnish artist’s first one-man exhibition in Italy, although he was already present this past April at BIG Torino 2000. Fire was also the main theme for a Parantainen series taken in the early 90s. In that instance, the works dealt with black and white images centered around a landscape theme. Fire assumes an enigmatic meaning in those photographs: flaming lights underneath a river’s mirror of water, stakes set ablaze in the midst of a clearing.

For this one-man show, however, the artist captured the interiors of abandoned buildings, photography of a large rather than small format. Into these works he has introduced everyday furnishings, here a sink or chair, there a refrigerator or book case; these he then covered in a veil of extremely powerful, inflammable cement which he subsequently lit, focusing the lens on the exact location and at the precise moment when and where the fire burst into flames.

It is important to observe that while the scenic set-up requires extremely long preparation, the moment photographically documented is, by contrast, extremely brief, like a single frame of motion-picture film. Parantainen defines his work as "artistic pyromania", played along the lines of ambiguity. In fact, fire has long been evoked as a destructive element (the great blaze in the library recalls the specter of the end of present culture in the novel Fahrenheit 451), but at the same time fire’s purifying function is also evident.

On the one hand, Parantainen’s works focus on the loss of control connected with the idea of fire – the innate fear in the collective unconscious that identifies fire with an uncontainable and innate force. On the other hand, the works underline the idea of positive change. This tension is particularly evident with the large format photography and the light-boxes, which both confer a three-dimensional effect to the flames. Other images recapture instead the interior form of flames in their everyday dimensions, just before the fire ignites or right after the blaze is extinguished. In this case the dominant atmosphere is of an apparent calm, of a static silence that is an essential precursor to an apocalyptic event.




Tiziana Conti
Translation by Cortney Price