Lorena Martínez De Corral (ES):
Kimmo Schroderus displays a great analytical faculty and a capacity for change. After realising works on canvas, on mirrors, in leather and in wood, he has recently been applying metal techniques to sculpture, while at the same time alluding to two very different formal referents: forms taken from architecture and forms taken from the hand-crafted object, as well as from nature and construction, from movement and equilibrium. The ranges of forms that he is working on at the moment span an interest in representation and a certain intimation of landscape. Out of steel, he constructs pieces that go beyond the limits of the traditional space of sculpture (the three-dimensional), so as to deal simultaneously with open space and closed space, with the interior and the exterior. In his constructions he ‘represents’ sculptural landscapes. This is a very personal process, which explores organic shapes in a quest for a new interpretation of sculpture.
Many of his works have an optical effect, a way of working on the material and the masses in which the boundaries are a consequence of his choices of plastic form. His sculptures are always compositions that are filled with movement, from which he eliminates the specific gravity of the materials, producing a tension, an alternation between what we see and what is concealed: surfaces, outlines, fusions, separations, opaque, dense, shiny modulations, which constitute his sculptures.
There was another striking aspect to the work made by Schroderus, who I consider a ‘very Finnish’ artist. I am referring here to his incorporation, either through choice or need, of handicraft techniques that are on the verge of disappearing: the respect for wood, the flawless welding, the prominence of metal, cloth and leather. In his sculptures he is extremely interested in accentuating the process of fabrication and the materials used. Meanwhile, the obsessively laborious method of shaping and combining thin steel rods, clamps, nuts, bolts, seams, smooth, wavy edges, flat, resilient surfaces mean that the spectator’s gaze takes pleasure in all this and is incapable of moving on from the work. His creative process is fascinating, for instance, in his sketches, his books and his welding, in the material creation of the pieces and in the difficult polishing phase, which adds a new dimension to his creation.
And the final outcome is magnificent, since it is both metaphorical and literal. Kimmo clearly displays an interest in the link between the perception and the idea, between the anecdotal and the extraordinary, between the baroque and the modern, and between ordinary language and new means of representation. His shapes, unmistakably innovative in their figuration, are not mere transcriptions of things that already exist, but are invitations to other worlds of seduction, somewhere between poetics and irony, but always with a cogent beauty.
Lorena Martínez De Corral (ES), curator, critic (2004)