Taidemaalariliitto

Senja Vellonen spent nearly twenty years observing a wooden villa in Northern Helsinki. The outcome is a series of watercolors, presented in the exhibition The Persistence of Memory at tm•gallery.

During the observation period, the once-inhabited house became abandoned and was eventually destroyed in a fire.

Not a single one of Vellonen’s paintings features people; the story of the house is told through the shifting moods of the works. In the title piece of the exhibition, the use of gold leaf can be seen as a reference to the Orthodox heritage of an émigré family; silhouetted against a deep blue starry sky, the house awaits a new dawn, while in the darker, more melancholic watercolors, the deserted house stands in the night—abandoned, solitary.

In her paintings, Vellonen does more than depict the house—she empathizes with its history. As Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, every house has its own spirit.

Vellonen’s watercolors, painted with thin, overlapping layers of color, are as much studies of light and shadow as they are of the building itself. In the words of Balthus: “One must learn to stalk light. Its variations. Its escapes and transitions.”

Timo Surojegin

Thank you: Arts Promotion Centre Finland