KINETIC POEMS, IMAGES AND PAINTINGS – EINO RUUTSALO
“My exhibition material mainly consists of works from the 1960s. These are from a period when traditional painting had taken a back seat, and I began pursuing a freer form of expression through open-ended material choices. I wanted to expand my creative repertoire, merging the material of my films with my painting career, achieving a more spontaneous language of expression, three-dimensionality, and various approaches to interpreting movement. For me, this occurred before the discovery of tangible kinetic movement.
Through these endeavors, I naturally stumbled upon the use of letters, text, letter-images, and visual poems—multi-layered expressions of letters and their multidimensional readability. I see this form of expression as belonging more to the realm of imagery than verbal communication. For me, the question was purely visual art.
I found these explorations intriguing for two reasons. First, I wanted my work to exist within the realm of moving images, even though I employed letters. Second, as someone from a small language group, I felt that messages written in my own ‘language’ did not require translation.
This period of work included, in addition to visual poems and letter-images, letter reliefs, individual neon letters, plastic boxes containing three-dimensional letter collages, and the use of letters in films.
It also encompassed paintings on film negatives, the manipulation of film frames into images, experimental films, slide paintings, nail boxes, scrap material collages, and photo montages. Audio tapes were also part of my spatial thinking.
Thus, the central themes of my 1960s work involved exploring and developing letters, numbers, and images in various ways.”
– Eino Ruutsalo