Kalervo Palsa - The Earth is a Sinful Picture

"The Eagle of Kittilä, the great artist of ingenious power, Kalervo Palsa, Kivitie 14.B., 99100 Kittilä, Finland"
The address on the letter sent to Palsa from Sweden by Kyösti Kaukonen, an artist; the envelope used to be pasted on Palsa's front door

"It's the greatness of man I depict, his limitless opportunities, but usually I depict the way he misuses his greatness." - K. Palsa

During his most vigorous creative spell when he was staying at my place in Helsinki in the early 1970s, Kalervo Palsa said: "I want to be the gloomiest painter in Europe." Palsa's paintings evoke a reality that is simultaneously distressing and rich in black humour. The levitating figure hanging himself in his own giant penis in Liberation (1978) is a good example of Palsa's world view. Extremely striking, it depicts the subject of the artist as a circus trickster aiming at shocking the audience with his combination of suicide and masturbating. On the wall of the room in the picture there is a painting of an eagle flying over a Lapp landscape. A macabre joke perhaps, but at the same time a convulsive question mark about the paradox of liberty: will this Houdini survive the embrace of noose orgasm and death? Or is it a symbol of the elevating ecstasy and simultaneously, self-destructive force, of the overgrown life force of a lonely ego?

Death and sexuality, booze and violence are the central themes in Palsa's "fantastic realism". The title of a novel by Timo K. Mukka, a good friend of Palsa's, The Earth is a Sinful Song, is an apt title for Palsa's imagery as well. The colours of the polar night by Reidar Särestöniemi, the painter of the overwhelming beauty of Lapp landscapes and its sun, turned sinful and sombre in Palsa's works. The moon has covered the sun and people are werewolves turning on each other.

I first met Palsa in the Young People's Art Event in 1970. We had both gained success with our comics in the underground category. Later, Palsa came to study in Helsinki and stayed at my place in Kristianinkatu street. It was something of a shock when he spread his paintings around the flat. Skeletons dancing and screwing, and even the very symbol of life and generosity, Father Christmas, entering a bourgeois home as a skeleton, carrying an axe. Meths drinkers drinking themselves to death. Delirium tremens and suicide in various forms, hanging in particular. Masses of people torturing and killing themselves in the starkest surroundings. Naked women frozen on the snow. Arseholes in different variations: one with a monocle, the Cultured Eye, one bleeding. Self-portraits in show-off or self-pitying postures, or openly masturbating with the penis erect towards the viewer. And penises, in all styles: realistic, sturdy penises, surrealistic finger penises, pop penises, expressionistic penises in barbed wire garlands. The latter was called Friedrich Nietzsche Laureated (1972). Watercolours, drawings, collages, oil paintings, and a large stack of blue notebooks: a necrophile comics novel Memoirs of a pensioner.

At the time, I studied psychology in the University of Helsinki, and Palsa taught me depth psychology by constantly painting and drawing. Once he had painted a shocking picture in which a gay couple defecated in each others' mouths on a Matissean sofa. "I wonder what Matisse would say about this," pondered Kalle, laughing in his characteristic manner and added something about the words of Henri Matisse who said that a painting should be "like an easy chair".

The One that Dies in Gethsemane

I got to know a true genius with a particular sense of morality.
As early as his early twenties, he had made most of his life's work in a small hut made of boards at his home in Kittilä. You can still see the faded text " Gethsemane " written on the door. This biblical place referring to extreme solitude and suffering was the headquarters of his solitary, romantic guerrilla movement in which pain was turned into art through vulgar vigour. His only audience at the time were the local drunkards, the only outsiders he could trust. It was in this lonely and poor Gethsemane where his art was created and there he also died, of pneumonia, in 1987.

Although Palsa was a nihilist and saw death as the only solution, he possessed the endless positiveness of a creative personality. Despite its hellish horse-laughter, Palsa's production shows an extravagant, bubbling life force. Palsa was a Bakhtinian carnivalist, laughing through all his orifices at all those seeking power, and at himself as well. His vengeance, like that of Kullervo in the Kalevala, was aimed at bourgeois attitudes suppressing creativity and life. In terms of politics, he was a flaming red Stalinist, yet one who painted even Lenin with balls. Death was the true revolutionary after all, the rebel that clears away all evil and promotes life. One of Palsa's ferocious paintings shows Death as a lumberjack arriving at the town hall, swinging his scythe.

It was clear that decent people found it impossible to take a real interest in Palsa's art. He continuously turned his back to the depressive world of the godless and sought refuge from cultural geniuses, identifying with August Strindberg so strongly that he believed himself to be Strindberg's reincarnation. Axel Sandemose's Law of Jante was his ten commandments. Palsa kept comparing himself to great painters such as Vilho Lampi, Otto Dix, and Vincent van Gogh. "Like van Gogh, I, too, want to make sermons with my work, make things right, tear away all hatred and evil so that only love remains", he wrote in his diary on 8 February 1967.

Feeling sick and seeing fiction

The only sexual object this shy Northern man, who painted sexual monsters, had was a radiator, curved and warm all right. When he arrived from Gethsemane for the first time in a centrally heated flat, he began the habit of putting his hands inside the radiator. "They are like a woman's breasts, healing my numb hands," he said and painted a surrealistic series of this first love with warmth. Radiator on fire. Radiator frozen. Out with radiator. He lived like an intellectual monk, eating little and drinking next to nothing. He was intoxicated with his nightmarish dreams, which he turned into comics with unbelievable diligence. When painting his René Magritte-style masterpieces in which he sits or skis in a flat where it is snowing inside while it is summer outside, he also drew a comic strip in which his landlord provides him with skis, and living in the flat becomes a skiing trip, ending in the Arctic Ocean with The Shipwreck of Hope.

Palsa continuously studied art history and was inspired to combine the influences with his own hallucinations, which yet always carried a concrete observation of the world. The style of Hieronymus Bosch created skies for bubbly lovers or infernos of Kittilä nightlife. Francisco Goya encouraged him to paint the structural violence in the streets. Edvard Munch made him sharpen the scythe of lust. He found sources of inspiration in both high and low culture, films, comics, advertisements, or the art history of the mentally ill or outsiders, a subject that he knew thoroughly. In Tex Willer Saga comic strip the heroic gunman clears Skullstone Town of filth and finds the Venus of Milo. Kit Carson, his accomplice, says: "Just look at the kitsch."

Palsa transferred all his moods and memories to paper and provided them with signatures and dates for "future researchers". Kalle's quiet working was so intensive and the silence so formidable that I had to keep coming back to check on him in case he had finally committed the suicide he kept dreaming about. But I learned that death was the skull on this philosopher's desk, his inspiration and muse, through the eyes of which you could see the world more accurately. To Palsa, pornography was one of the forms of death and an instrument of political examination.

"In the future, Miss Finland will advertise chocolate which is actually her own excrement. First, everyone will frown with disgust. Then they will rush to buy it." This was Palsa's joking prophecy of advertising, today becoming more and more perverse.

"Does it make you feel sick?" Kalle always asked when he showed his paintings. Well, yes, at the time. Now, after seeing all the hard-boiled horrors in art, Palsa's paintings make you smile. You think of them as fantasy, in the footsteps of Hugo Simberg. Although the intestine masturbator in Self-breeding (1980 and 1987) may first shock you, or while the Shit Man (1972), rising from the hole in the outhouse of Palsa's now destroyed studio in Kittilä, may first make you feel sick, the colour harmonies are simply delicious.

A Finnish Outburst

In the early 1980s, Ratto, a porn magazine, was the only medium to do a story on Palsa's art. Kalle was indignant. "I'm a great Sartrean existentialist who should be presented in Suomen Kuvalehti". In the 1990s, Tere Vadén, a philosopher, made a significant study on the disappearance of Finnishness, Arktinen hekkuma (published by Atena) and used Palsa's work as an example of the outburst that is the sole remnant of the original thinking that European religion and philosophy have in the course of history eradicated from the Finns. During the era of the EU, this centralised crime will go on with full force, in politics as well as public art.

I am sure that Kalle would have appreciated Vadén's thoughts, for he deliberately depicted this mute, original bellowing of our Northern periphery, the vomiting and sexual ecstasy, the moaning and swearing, which also makes manifest the injury caused by imported civilisation. Palsa painted the immortal Kalervo-Kullervo hanged in an oak tree, on the bark of which this all-defiant anti-hero writes with his penis the words of the fascist führer: "The world is a trophy for the strong."

Palsa must have been a feminist, too. Has anyone ever put the male disease into words as bluntly as he?

Erkki Pirtola
The writer is an artist, reporter, and a personal friend of Kalervo Palsa

Kalervo Palsa - Resurrection 14 September 2002 to 12 January 2003