Bo Nilsson (SE):
At first sight, we might get the impression that Silja Rantanen's art is trying to go in several different directions at once, directions in which the figurative is mingled with the abstract. We might even get the idea that it involves a conscious setting up of oppositions aimed at proving some postmodern hypothesis about the impossibility of a unary style at a time when it is difficult to conceive of a unary subject. This oppositional aspect of her art is not so much rooted in a desire to baffle the viewer as in an urge to investigate a multiplicity of different starting points that make up the foundation on which her painting rests.
Some of Rantanen’s themes are recognisable, but it is not the source that is relevant here. It is not necessarily their content or spatial nucleus that Rantanen is interested in. Equally often her attention has focused on a detail or on something that might seem peripheral, which has then provided the starting point for a painting. As a consequence, her motifs or original subjects are occasionally unrecognizable, or as though unfamiliarised. This is also accentuated in paintings in which the convergence between the initial motif and surface of the painting is often problematic.
Silja Rantanen has delved into the role of space in painting, and we can make out various models, for instance, the illusory qualities of the Renaissance space, which can be compared to a window, or the lack of space formation characteristic of the Modernist space, in which the painting acts as a surface. But Rantanen also works on a late-Modernist spatial model, in which the painting has aquired sculptural qualities by marking out its own physical presence in the viewer’s space.
We can get the impression that Rantanen has wanted to capture the paradoxical qualities of space, but her interest seems to be directed more towards a systematisation and ordering of a series of different spatial archetypes. This is as close as we can get to an ABC of space, one that provides an important basis for understanding what painting is, and we might perhaps speak of an ‘ur-language’ of painting.
In many of her paintings, these combined experiences of space have resulted in a sedimentation into a spatial ambivalence, which can bear certain resemblances to a void. But this as a condensed void, as though it had been sampled or collected together from various paintings. We can easily associate this with the collected silence that Heinrich Böll’s Doktor Murke edited together from the various pauses on his tape player. This is an analytical projection back into the history of painting, which its roots in the conventions of painting and in painterly codes. But, with Rantanen, historical knowledge is transformed into a highly personal starting point, one that provides a new start to an exciting journey, one that is impossible to predict. Challenges of this kind make it possible to dismiss all claims about the death of painting. Painting lives on, and Silja Rantanen is one of those who are giving it life.
Bo Nilsson (SE), Director of the Rooseum in Malmö, Sweden (1996)