Galleri Flach is proud to present a series of new works by Jorma Puranen in the exhibition Surfaces and Scenens Beyond. The exhibition shows a number of photographs engaged in the story of light and reflections that for many years have been at the core of Jorma Puranen’s works.
Since the early 90s Jorma Puranen has worked with photography, exploring and visualizing themes as history, knowledge, landscape and nature. The images possess a strong visual brilliance and communicate aspects of history, past and present time. By interfering with reflections of light and shadows between the viewer and the subject, as in the series Shadows, Reflections and all that kind of Things, and Icy Prospects, the viewer encounters a thrilling and beautiful journey through historical oil portraits and landscapes. Puranen’s method of working with light and reflections creates a quality similar to a double exposure, as being in two places simultaneously.
Like many other artists, Jorma Puranen is interested in obsolete technologies, abandoned places, outmoded materials and archives. In the present photographs he returns to the collections of negatives by the famous Finnish photographer Daniel Nyblin, whose photographs of well-known landscape paintings from his own time in the late 19 th century, are now getting their own meaning. The aged negatives with cracks and scratches appear in Puranen’s works as a sort of secret manuscripts. Through the cracked glass the viewer can imagine an additional content and layers of different stories that are intertwined in a multilayered tapestry. In the series entitled Landscapes in full color, an albumen paper obscures the motive, as a metaphorical membrane between a bygone era and the present time in which we live.
Jorma Puranen describes his photographs as a kind of embodiment of time and light. The reflections of the light become a mediator of history that both adds and obscures parts of the story.
Jorma Puranen is born 1951, lives and works in Finland. He has exhibited extensively in Scandinavia and internationally. In Sweden he was most recently part of the exhibition Framing Bodies at The Hasselblad Centre, Gohtenburg, (2015), Barockt at Kulturhuset, Stockholm (2014), and at Galleri Flach, Sixteen Steps to Paradise, (2012). Other recent exhibitions: Faces Now – European Portrait Photography since 1990, Palais de Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Nederlands Fotointituut, Rotterdam and Museum of Photography Thessaloniki (2015), Faces to Faces, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2015), The Idea of Landscape, DZ BANK Kunstsammlung, Frankfurt (2015