Tuomas A. Laitinen: Moderate Hardness

Tuomas A. Laitinen’s solo exhibition, Moderate Hardness, at Helsinki Contemporary carries on the visual expression and the themes of his solo show Fundamental Matter at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, including: the use of natural resources, urbanization, and the global economy.

Where Fundamental Matter is a wide-ranging whole, addressing its subject matter across a broad spectrum, going from the general to the specific, Moderate Hardness is a more personal exhibition. It works through small gestures, and advances via various shades of emotion.

The key work in the exhibition, the light installation A Room for You, accentuates intuitive, subjective sensory experience. Laitinen has used various objects to assemble a stripped-down staging without a drama; a darkened stage, on which the lights direct the movement of the gaze. This is a subtle, intimate space, which simultaneously reveals and conceals its contents. The objects placed in the space are hints, conveyed a bit at a time, at the state of consciousness of some unknown person. The lights act like words at a first meeting: what is told is only a fragment. The story can be sensed, but it remains a riddle.

In the video piece Azure Dune (for J. G. Ballard) a mysterious, possibly menacing dune landscape quakes like the sea beneath an infinite sky. It tells of deep time, of resources hidden within the strata of the globe, and of their gradual exhaustion. In the work’s imagery the metallic ore needed to manufacture copper is fused with a desert landscape. This is a hypnotic sight that evokes images of what might be the true dimensions of our material and digital reality.