Susanna Vuorio: Breathing Down My Neck

Throughout my career as an artist, I have tried to depict reality—those aspects of reality that receive little attention. The experiences of people who remain unseen. This year, however, it has felt as though the situation is somewhat different. The world has taken a sharp turn for the worse, and problems that were previously invisible have become visible. More and more people are feeling the pressure at the back of their necks.

I no longer feel that I need to explain why I paint the subjects I do. They are as self-evident as the image of Jesus in a church. Everywhere, we can see how the Nordic welfare state and the Western sense of security have begun to fall apart. It takes active effort to escape reality if one wants to keep the problems of society out of the pictures.

Perhaps paradoxically, this has made me pay even more attention to the material process of painting. I have tried to explore the means of painting—the composition, the sense of space, the traces of the brush, brighter or more muted colours, a stiffer or softer line. These are ways of reaching deeper into that difficult-to-articulate human condition: what is happening here, and how people feel about it.

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