Birdlife, 2021, Galerie Anhava, Helsinki

Päivi Takala’s (b.1970) exhibition Birdlife continues her work with examining the deconstruction of painting. In Takala’sworks, restrained, layered coats of paint conjoin with the abrasive nature of materials brought from a construction site. Takala has sawed off pieces from her existing paintings and attached them into new works with concrete. Thesetransplants reveal the human urge to control the environment, and they draw attention to considerations pertaining to thecharacter and materiality of the paintings.
For Takala, paintings exist not only as art objects but also as exploitable raw material for creating new works and a newcontext. The artist herself speaks of it as ‘painting a new purpose’. Images of birds, detached from the paintings with an electric saw, have been brutally crushed into gravel inside the concrete, into cogs in a machine or as construction materialfor a staircase. The images, stripped from their original environment, as well as the empty holes left by them, are sealed to their places with concrete, that seems to merge with the surface of the painting creating at the same time a disruption bypushing out from its margins.
Backdrops and dioramas, familiar stage elements from Päivi Takala’s earlier works, are now supplemented by performers.Pictures of birds have been brought onto the stage, house plants crossbred with wild ones.  The birds attached withconcrete to a Renaissance sky or an idealized landscape do not seem to represent freedom, but are more like ornaments,frozen mid-flight: images of images, which serve as reflections of our personal imagery, cemented permanently in thefinished work. Other images of birds are arranged into rows, as in an archive. This may evoke ideas about the human needto control the chaotic environment, our urge to categorise and analyse living beings through pictures, as well as questionsof power related thereto. 
The contrast created by the soft brush strokes and the sawed-off, abrasive surface treated with concrete, brings the artist’spainting process to the fore. For Takala, the use of concrete does not constitute an intervention in painting, but a naturalcontinuation of brush strokes – she paints with concrete. From another perspective, the treatment of the painting surfaceforegrounds the materiality of the painting in a tangible way. The rough treatment of a work that was originally producedwith great skill and devotion raises the question of the inviolability of the painting: why does it leave such a violentimpression on us when a piece is sawed off from a “simple” painted surface – a picture? The bird gravel cast into theconcrete staircase also directs our attention to the materials around us: what is the surrounding world built of and how dowe react to it? 

Aleksandra Oilinki, Galerie Anhava