Pertti Kekarainen

When Kekarainen began working in the 1990s, photography in Finland was moving rapidly from journalism and documentary culture into contemporary art spaces. Staged photography, color, video, and installation were being explored at the same time. The Finnish Museum of Photography has described the period as one in which photographers unsettled a documentary-centered understanding of the medium and expanded its materials and modes of display^*11。

From Sculpture and Painting to Photography

Born in Oulu in 1965, Kekarainen did not begin from photography alone; he was trained as both a sculptor and a painter^*4. Galerie Anhava describes his addition of lines, rods, spheres, and fields of color to the photographic surface as a way of working simultaneously with three-dimensional structure and painterly illusion^*2. The artist biography published by Persons Projects likewise notes that he was both a Helsinki School photographer and a member of the Association of Finnish Sculptors, reinforcing the spatial basis of his work^*16. Photography allowed him to preserve traces of an actual room while superimposing another space through the placement of colors and objects. His method depends on the medium’s ability to bring sculptural organization and painterly manipulation of the plane into collision within a single image.

The Helsinki School and International Circulation

The Helsinki School was less a unified style than a system of circulation based at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, linking education, publishing, galleries, and international photography festivals. Aalto University has documented how students and faculty created their own channels for exhibitions and criticism abroad at a time when photography was not yet fully institutionalized as art within Finland^*10. Its sustained participation in Paris Photo presented this work internationally through the circuits of photography fairs and exhibitions, where it was framed in terms of large-scale color photography and conceptual art^*9. The exhibition 30 by TaiK placed Kekarainen among more than thirty artists drawn from the school’s students and faculty, showing the institutional path from education to international exhibition^*15. Pori Art Museum’s Intersection—Between Past and Future similarly situated him within a Finnish photographic culture where established visual languages met new forms of image-making^*18。

Modernist Abstraction and the Difference from Ola Kolehmainen

The Finnish Museum of Photography’s Abstract! traced a century of photographic abstraction, from László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray to the present, in which light and the arrangement of objects transform recognizable subjects^*13. Kekarainen’s Helsinki School contemporary Ola Kolehmainen also isolates architecture as arrangements of color, light, repetition, and surface, turning buildings into nearly abstract images^*21. Kekarainen does more than flatten architectural details. He preserves the depth created by corridors and doors, then places fields of color or spheres in front of it. Where Kolehmainen draws abstraction from architectural surfaces, Kekarainen collides a specific interior with abstract form, destabilizing the very moment in which a photograph produces depth.

TILA is a series of roughly 130 works developed from around 2004 onward. Its title draws on the Finnish word tila, which can mean “space,” “room,” “distance,” or “state of mind”^*3. This range of meanings joins the photographed site to the space mentally constructed by the viewer.

TILA and the Interruption of Depth

In TILA (Passage I), the perspective of the corridor and doorways draws the eye inward, while black shadows and veils of color interrupt that movement. The Metropolitan Museum of Art explains that these obstructions complicate the reading of architectural space and make viewers conscious of both the photograph’s flatness and its illusion of depth^*1. Because it is difficult to decide immediately whether a given area is a wall, a shadow, or color laid on the photographic surface, viewers must pause and test their certainty that they are looking into a room. The intervention does more than embellish reality with fantasy; it exposes, one by one, the cues through which depth is judged.

Bildmuseet describes TILA as a series of unremarkable interiors in which the photographed space is always filtered or altered in some way^*22. In corridors and rooms where no event occurs, the addition of a field of color or an obstruction brings forward the question of which lines are read as walls, shadows, or forms on the image surface. The lack of incident allows shifts in judgment during the act of looking to become the work’s content.

Where Does the Field of Color Belong?

The dark red in TILA (dark red) can appear either as an object within the room or as color applied to the photograph’s surface. Exhibition material from 2008 emphasizes that the works approach painting’s spatial illusion while retaining photography’s trace of an actual place^*4. Tila passage 5 in the Société Générale Collection likewise shows architectural lines and layers of color cutting into one another and preventing the viewer from occupying a stable position^*5. Color functions less as a sign of atmosphere than as matter whose location—within the depicted room or on the image plane—cannot be securely determined.

The Viewer Completes What Cannot Be Seen

In Finnish, tila refers not only to a room or the inside of an object but also to the interval between things, a condition, or a state of mind. Kekarainen has explained that the experience of an interior is never purely visual; it is formed through scale, light, materials, function, sound, smell, touch, and bodily movement^*24. When part of a wall or doorway is hidden in TILA, viewers complete what they cannot see through memory and bodily knowledge. The series is concerned less with a room as a diagram than with a space assembled mentally from fragments.

Density—Traces of Color After People and Objects Have Gone

In Density, which preceded TILA, colored points and afterimages produced through mechanical camera operations float over furniture and interiors. The publication text from Persons Projects compares them to shadows left by relations among people and objects, or to ghosts of conversations and thoughts, and notes their affinity with early spirit photography^*25. Helsinki School’s publication information likewise presents the progression from Density to TILA as a sustained inquiry into realities that remain present without being visible^*23. The colored points interfere with depth while also acting as traces of absent people and completed events. Seen through this earlier work, the empty rooms of TILA are not simply uninhabited architectural records. They ask viewers to supply obscured objects and spaces that continue beyond the frame.

A Distance from Architectural Photography

Conventional architectural photography values the clear communication of structure, use, and material. Kekarainen uses the same corridors, windows, and stairways, but inserts foreign forms into the seams of perspective instead of increasing descriptive precision. Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg’s exhibition of Finnish photography observed that perspectival space and chromatic space penetrate one another in his work^*7. Abitare’s review of the exhibition similarly focused on the way space becomes uncertain in vision, rather than on a straightforward record of Nordic architectural sensibility^*8。

The works are organized as series that repeat the same problem through different rooms, colors, and obstructions, rather than as isolated visual devices. Photography-now’s record of exhibitions and publications since the 1990s shows that this repetition has provided the structure of Kekarainen’s long-term work^*6。

TILA (Passage I) and the Corridor

Because a corridor is one of architecture’s clearest demonstrations of depth, it offers an effective means of disrupting the rules of perception. In Passage I, the vanishing point produced by repeated doorways collides with an opaque foreground form, placing an entrance and an obstruction in the same image^*1. Viewers are invited to imagine entering the space, yet cannot move beyond the photographic surface. This back-and-forth turns a quiet interior description into a structure that includes the duration of looking.

Spatial Changes and the Large-Scale Print

In Spatial Changes, colors and lines added to the photographed architecture reorganize the positions of walls, reflections in windows, and the direction of shadows^*2. Large color prints do more than reveal detail. They fill the viewer’s field of vision and give fields of color an almost objectlike force. EMMA’s exhibition Red treated the color across the work of several contemporary artists as emotion, material, and sign, demonstrating that color in Kekarainen’s photographs functions as more than decoration^*19。

Photobooks and Exhibition Space

The library record for Paikka1 shows that the work was edited into a publication about place as well as presented in exhibitions^*20. The publishing program at Persons Projects also circulated Helsinki School photography internationally through sequences of series, texts, and plates^*17. In a photobook, the physical pressure of a large-scale installation recedes, but each turn of the page produces another space, allowing the series to be read like a single architecture.

Kekarainen’s reception can be understood through both the institutional history of Finnish photography’s internationalization and the medium-specific question of how a photograph constructs space. The Finnish Museum of Photography’s Photo and Video placed him within a section devoted to large-scale color work in new Finnish photography and showed it in an exhibition environment that also included contemporary moving-image art^*14。

Points of Contact with Abstract Photography

The Finnish Museum of Photography’s Abstract! did not define abstraction narrowly as the absence of a subject. It presented a history in which light, surface, reproduction, and composition remake the appearance of reality^*13. Kekarainen’s interiors retain specific walls and doorways, yet these elements loosen into relations among fields of color and lines. Because the images never become fully abstract, they can test the precise moment when convincing depth begins to break down.

Inside and Outside the Helsinki School

Wild 90s reconsidered Finnish photography of the 1990s as a period of competing approaches to the body, gender, staging, and material experimentation, resisting its reduction to a single polished brand^*12. Kekarainen’s photographs likewise cannot be explained solely through Nordic stillness or immaculate large-scale printing. While sharing the precision of large-format color photography, he interrupts the continuity of perspective through fields of color, obstructions, and reflections, creating visual resistance within the Helsinki School’s polished image world.

Suspending Architectural Description to Show How Depth Emerges

Kekarainen uses corridors, windows, and the lines of walls to expose the conditions through which photography establishes depth, setting aside detailed accounts of a building’s function or social history. Prints approaching life size enter the gallery as surfaces that compete with the viewer’s body, rather than as small windows hung on a wall^*24. The change his work introduced therefore lies in more than the abstraction of architecture. Over the duration of looking, it unsettles where a person standing before the photograph ceases to believe in the depicted interior and begins to recognize the image surface.