Statements

Open letter to Göteborgs Posten

To Ingrid Elam and Crispin Ahlström (Göteborgs Posten GP)
My name is Kimmo Hakonen and I have an exhibition along with Per-Gunnar Kramer on Gallery Bergman. I heard that you visited my exhibition and I became happy. When I then read your statement in GP I became disappointed and realized that it was only your body that was there, you had forgotten to take your soul with you. Because your statement was thinner than water. No fish, no plants, nothing alive, only little sand on bottom. GP is a big newspaper in Sweden’s second largest city, it is not a provincial newspaper with limited resources and limited selection of people that want to work there. A review is more than a description physically of something. A review at its best contains analysis of contents, description, own interpretation. It is good when the reviewed matter have been considered by feelings and knowledge and experience.

Aren’t the cultural pages to have debate, and to judge the deeper aspects of the human mind, to talk about the spectrum of different feelings and thoughts that people have? Isn’t it pages there something else than entertainment with laughter and action can have a forum. What I want to say with this is that a deep art critic is good for better understanding of other human expressions. It is important to take your own and other peoples feelings and expressions for real. They are not doing the art for fun it is a matter of mental survival as a human being.

Finally I want to say that only to simply describe something without filtering it through your experience and feelings filter, that can anybody do. It is not enough to shoot from the hip, it requires more for a review to be good. What you need is passion, engagement and blood. I like constructive criticism good as well as bad, something that can develop my mind. It is laciness and unengagement that I react against in this article of yours. I welcome GP to my coming exhibitions but if the criticism does not get better than this you do not need to come.
With friendly greetings

Kimmo Hakonen
Gothenburg 980120

Some thoughts about art and life.

I don’t try to impress other people, but only myself; see how far I dare to go; find new feelings and thoughts at the bottom of the vast unconscious world.

Mankind has explored most of what there is to explore on earth; all the territories are mapped out and analysed. But despite this we still have the largest areas left to explore: our own inner landscapes, the unconscious world. This is where art comes in.

A degenerator tries to degenerate people to become emotional and living individuals who follow their instincts and deep feelings, instead of following a pattern that society has established.

My artistic work is about unconscious states and emotions; a language of the soul.

I work with painting, drawing, graphics and sculpture free from the unconscious, governed by emotion. When it feels right one is filled with a sensation of spiritual wealth; like having created a friend, someone to talk to, a life.

My father

You give me rest, your hard, rough bark feels smooth in your shapes.

You never reached the sun in your struggle, but it looks like you’ve had a rich life.

Isn’t that after all the most important: the life rich in nuances, experiences, learning, little mysteries to wonder at.

The cavity that leads almost down to the bottom of your soul is dark, but I see that the sun shines in down there; I also see that the crack is deep down to the bottom.
I don’t want to look down your chasm out of respect for your life, perhaps some day you’ll show me, in your way, how it feels.
I hope the soil in your glade provides you with nourishment so that you manage to live on, and that the wind and the sun provides you with something to wonder at and experience every day, like everyday life has been for you the last 500 years.

To the outside

To get to the outside takes time and time and more time. It also takes inner strength that the child inside you must have. It also takes much introspection and a lot of thinking, to figure out who is inside and how does he act on the outside. To get out what’s inside is not enough to look inside you must live inside to get the art to the outside.

Kimmo Hakonen

Meetings on the other side of the wall

Your landscape fits in perfectly in the view from my nest,

Behind the wall that protects from trespass your landscape is joined together with mine.
The image becomes close to perfect since the wall hides the seam that otherwise would have been visible.
Your landscape is all I see when I come out from my nest, but it exists other views on the sides and behind.

The main path leads straight forward through an alley of roses to your nest. When I stand here at your nest and looks against mine everything looks entirely different, just like I had been lost, like I do once in a while here in the forest around.

It is beautifully here at your place, I usually feel pleasant feelings here, not only they common everyday feelings but also other feelings that I do not always recognize.

These meetings have become a drug.

It smells good and tastes wonderful, to enjoy them. It is always unique it feels always in different ways. New feelings are being born.

The drug has made me addicted.

Meetings on the other side…

Kimmo Hakonen

I work with painting, drawing, prints and sculpture, freely out of the subconscious world and I let the feelings have control. When it feels right I become a man elated of a feeling, of mental wealth, it feels like I have created a friend somebody that I can talk to, something that is alive.

Kimmo Hakonen

The most original form of communication.

I see the image as a more original communication method than text. This statement is based on the fact that the image is something that each human has when they are born. We see directly and creates images within us of all things we react on. For example if something comes against us we try to move, when it gets dark some people get afraid and so on. The image is something that you feel more than you think. With the text it is different, we get taught in school to communicate with text. This fact can be resembled with an orange, where the orange itself is the intuitive image and the peel is the words.

Kimmo Hakonen