Antti Majava

Antti Majava is an artist who works in many different media. The characterising aspect of his work is their speficity to site and situation. The space itself is not important, however. Majava erects his social commentaries in places to show us our reality as a dynamic totality composed of our choices. For the tenth edition of OPEN, Majava created a weather-resistant painting called “Human Resistant” (2007), which has a maritime orientation. The work is a large painting done in the modern idiom, but it can also be seen as a constructed object that resembles a simplified navigation marker. From the viewpoint of the painting itself and from up close, the work is perhaps even too threatening, brusque and marker-like, not to mention the extreme artificiality of the material it is made of, bitumen mastic. Seen from afar, the work nevertheless also embodies the idea of survival and safety. It is important to the artist that the work should not only function as an artistic motif, but also that it allows observation without any of the demands customarily placed on art. The work comes close to the people walking on the Lido, but it is almost like a leading mark in that it seems to be intended for someone else, to be regarded from some other place. "Sometimes it feels good to see something from a ‘wrong’ angle: perhaps everything is not quite as it is meant to be. I like the idea that art always refers to someplace else, to some ‘other’. For me, it is the way of thinking in painting that provides a way of communicating contradictory messages, to function rationally within irrationality," says the artist.