|
Like a four-hand piano concerto by Robert
Schumann or an insightful paragraph by Edna O’Brien, the collages
of Maritta
Tapanainen offer an appealingly modest but quietly intense
pleasure. While everyone else is chasing the next big something, she
is discreetly re-creating the prior old everything. Prior:
The very scale Tapanainen works on—most pieces could comfortably
lie in the palms of your two hands—recalls an era far before the
proliferation of bazooka-huge artistic statements. Old:
Creating cool-brown and off-white backgrounds out of what look like
antique Band-Aids, Tapanainen collates images from biology textbooks
and botanists’ diaries dating from Herbert Hoover’s day. Everything:
Her collages—whirlpools of pulsing, squishy, pullulating
shapes—create bottomless, Miró-like circuitries you feel you
could fall into. The air of scrupulous hygiene and the pervasive
aura of a ninth-grade kid peering through a microscope might fool
you into thinking Tapanainen’s assemblages are a meek,
mouse-brown, whimsical affair. In fact, her worlds thrum with a
barely concealed sexuality: Pomegranate-like radiating grids and
writhing corpuscles suggest nerve-filled openings seeking the graze
of a fingertip. Still, Tapanainen appeals less to the viscera than
to the higher emotions: Out of the seeming clamor of her
“protozoan poetics” (the writer Stuart Denenberg’s perfect
words) rings a Mozartian music. Bell-like jellyfish shapes
noiselessly echo each other, seemingly coarse shapes form secret
balances, and harmony rules Tapanainen’s amoebic cosmos. The work
left me feeling more euphoric than anything I’ve seen in
ages—weirdly becalmed yet electrified.
—Matthew
Wilder
|
