Morphology

exhibition catalog, 2008

Pavel Zoubok Gallery

No matter the source, no matter the subject, the images and image-fragments upon which Maritta Tapanainen alights,

she transmogrifies into living things. Relying chiefly on snippets of photo engravings, Tapanainen has long woven dense

mats of disparate but similarly textured depictions, providing them just enough space to suggest galaxies or fossil beds

or views into microscopic worlds teeming with nervously elegant protozoa. Machine parts, mammal innards, architectural

details, botanical dissections, and other excerpted items become so many diatoms, set afloat in pond after pond

after Sargasso Sea. Tapanainen’s is a universe up close.

     Restricting her source material almost exclusively to photogravure, Tapanainen has contributed significantly to a

sub-genre of collage going back almost to the introduction of the photo-engraving process. Max Ernst, its Dada inventor,

employed the method richly, as did the postwar fantasists he influenced. These latter artists, many associated with the

Beat sensibility, conjured a dream dynamic in sequences of sometimes risible, sometimes grotesque, sometimes metaphysical

hallucinations. Tapanainen may share their method, but does not share their vision. Rather, she partakes in a

more intimate sensibility in which vast spaces have given way to the private space of the page, and the human figure

has disappeared in favor of more abstract, more purely textural (and, from certain vantages, textual) subjects. The

metaphors in Tapanainen’s collages reside not in the pictures but in their constituents; that is, the poetics of her works

maintain not what seems to happen but what seems to be.

     Tapanainen’s work of the last several years is characterized by a kind of near-animation, not so much suspended as

diffused. These pictures are not of events but of conditions, still lifes rather than narratives, but still lifes invested with

a restless visual energy that draws in great part on the busy texture of photoengraving itself, the visual buzz afforded by

the quasi-typographic medium. Tapanainen amplifies this buzz by reformulating the nature of its density. In old newspapers

or banknotes, the tightly woven lines of engraving cluster into elaborately articulated images; here, by contrast,

they are loosened into contours, shapes and suggestions that at once remain distinct and weave casually together into

loosely articulated visual skeins.

     While they tend to accumulate more thickly in certain regions of the collage than others, the distribution of

forms is not so uneven as to counter or disrupt an overall sense of vegetative presence. Finally, after all, Maritta Tapanainen’s

collages read like botanic efflorescences, cultivated but growing wild. They have a notational quality to them,

born of their dependence on the photo-engraved line; but their figures seem to flourish at least a bit beyond the control

of any inscriptive power. Tapanainen comes off in these works not simply as collagist, or draughtsman, or writer, but as a

gardener, tending to fantastic, perhaps microscopic, indisputably vital eruptions of a whole new kind of flora.

          —Peter Frank, Senior Curator, Riverside Art Museum (Riverside, CA), and art critic for Angeleno Magazine and L.A. Weekly

From There to Here

Collage 1992–2007

exhibition catalog, 2007

Couturier Gallery

Protozoan Poetics

You will acknowledge in the work of Maritta Tapanainen the sweet absence of irony. This, and the self-evident beauty of

the handling of the collage medium are welcome relief from the pervasive vulgarity of a great deal of contemporary art.

     Because ours is a Heraclitean world— a world of perpetual change—as above, so below. And if Tapanainen’s collages

are evocative of a series of stills from a diatomaceous documentary, they also suggest common-place objects like brushes,

ladders, springs, hooks, feathers and worms. The eye takes endless delight in this feast of primal shapes, a micro-ballet

of paramecia, mitochondria, rotifers, and other evolutionary innocents, all suspended in an imagined medium whose

quality lies between air and water. The whole fish that occasionally swims past marks an essential change of scale. . . .

     The palette is elegance itself, the subdude, literate grey of scientific illustration, a radient empty white amid a cradle

of soft tans. . . . Each organelle subtly relates to every other as if in a spell, as if the elusive, unexpected organic forms

were each an artist in a studio sea. Where the work features only two or three elements selected from the welter of possibilities, a cool morphological harmony is achieved. Should a flower dream of seeing, and eye drifts nearby in the organic soup—such proximities organize resonances, distantly recognized in the fictive abbondanza—it enchants the more profoundly because its creatures are within us, swimming in the aqueous humour and the blood, living and dying with us in the encapsulated ocean that we are. Tapanainen is orchestrating new music; she is in control of a magical nanosphere; in these works we are gently allowed to join the dance.

—Stuart Denenberg, Los Angeles, California 2007