What does this picture show?

A picture is often assessed in relation to visible reality. In myths telling of the birth of the visual arts, the creation of a picture is presented as a substitute for reality: on a wall, a girl draws the outline of the shadow of her sweetheart who is going to war; a sculptor makes himself a sculpture of a woman for want of a real woman; a painter fools birds into pecking at painted grapes, and so on. A picture has been set the task of recording and presenting reality as it appears to human beings, and of acting as a substitute for reality. This task, called ‘representation', often remains in people's minds when they look at pictures.

A photograph shows this relationship to reality perfectly: it shows the reality set before the lens just as it is, without human interference. A photograph says: "This has been". The many trends of the art of the painter are actually always in some relation to photographic presentation: They can try to compete with photographs in the imitation of reality, or, conversely, they can completely deny any relationship with it.

A picture is a picture

Abstract art is the art of the rejecters. Abstract art is thought of as independent: an abstract picture neither presents nor represents anything; instead it turns attention on itself, the picture's own characteristics. Instead of the picture's subject matter, the viewer's attention is directed at the elements that make up the picture: forms, composition, colours, picture surfaces, materials, the painting as an object. In an abstract picture, a circle is no more the sun than the colour green depicts grass; they are merely a circle and the colour green.

Because an abstract picture is based on its own elements and materials, it is thought to be pure art, art in itself without any relationship to external reality. Similarly, the creation of the picture is the treatment of its surface, its division into parts and its construction. The viewer does not necessarily need to think about what Marianna Uutinen's work (Toy) might depict, it can just be studied as the result of the act of painting: from it, you can see how the painter has spread the paint.

From a picture to a picture surface

A photograph deals with picture surface in the same way as does abstract art: in principle, it is an equal, flat surface everywhere. The effect of both abstract art and photography is that the understanding of the picture is decisively altered. For example, to American artist, Julian Schnabel, the surface of a picture is a platform on which you can do almost anything. On it, he combines everything that he can: gesture painting, representational picture material, symbols, text, etc.

Abstract art leads you to think of the painter's canvas as a venue for events, as a field where things happen. So it is not a window on the wall, but rather the wall itself, or the floor, or any surface upon which you can work. In itself, painting is working and activity. This idea is taken further by American ‘action painting', a movement that greatly influenced Schnabel as he was developing. To him, the painter's canvas is a space and platform for action, where new worlds can be gathered together. Often the size of the painting surface is so vast that treating it is real physical labour. Creating the picture is not based solely on the sense of sight but also on close contact.

The idea of a picture has also been changed by digitalisation. Both painting and, in particular, photography have been thought of as mirrors of reality, and their relationship to reality as analogous, uniform. A digital image, then again, is based on calculation, its relationship to reality mathematical.

Sami Lukkarinen's painting No. 7 deals with this relationship. In the picture, information concerning reality is reduced by abstraction: details are concealed beneath uniform picture squares. At the same time, the painting is like a digital image, in which pixels containing information are reduced in number, the purpose being, for example, to make the subject difficult to recognise. In many ways, the relationships between the picture and reality have been reversed: the picture shows a photograph (in analogue form like the painting), but a digital image rather than an analogue one. The subject matter too toys with the tension between the photograph's power of proof and voyeurism, what it says and what it leaves unsaid, what its reveals and what it conceals.

Image and information

Different conceptions of pictures emphasise different aspects of a picture. A picture can be thought to contain information on external reality (semantic), on the picture itself (syntactic) or on the creator of the picture (expressive). In truth, all pictures have all these dimensions, but it is a question of where attention is focused at any given time.

A representational, photo-like picture points to something outside itself. It seems transparent like a window, because the intention is not to focus attention on how it was created. Then again, sometimes an artist takes care to ensure that the viewer will definitely notice the characteristics of the surface of the picture, or the traces he has left and the choices made, even when the subject matter is representational.

So, contemporary artists often question the direct relationship between the picture and its subject, and show how, between the picture and reality, there is always something, at least some interpretation, choice or point of view. They have a special way of expressing their views on the different languages of the picture: the subject of a work of art might be the relationship between the picture and reality, or an idea about what else the picture is.

-Kaija Kaitavuori