Katsura

For the artwork on the facade of Gymnasiet Lärkan, artist Silja Rantanen has forever set in stone her large pencil drawing. In the work Katsura, graphite-coloured lines cut across the smooth, paper-like white concrete surface, creating a multi-layered grid.

The grid motif has featured in Rantanen’s works for several decades. With the new work, Rantanen’s expression enters into a dialogue with modernist tradition and Japanese aesthetics. Katsura is a 17th-century imperial villa in Kyoto that has had a significant impact on spatial thinking in modern Western architecture.

The title of the work suggests an impression. Rantanen’s work is not based on the imperial villa’s architecture but on visual observations from the artist’s kitchen garden. Rantanen started exploring the grit motif in the 1990’s and after visiting Japan, she also began constructing a bamboo fence in her home garden. To date, this work has been ongoing for more than twenty years. For the artwork at Gymnasiet Lärkan, the artist drew the fence section by section. The final piece is a combination of drawings, and in reality the fence can’t ever be seen in the way the work depicts it. In the nine-metre-long piece, the fence appears in its natural scale. The work also captures the light of a winter night’s moon, which makes the shadows cast by the fence undulate on the surface of the snow.

“The distinctive character of the work does not arise from the pattern alone but from its casting in terrazzo concrete. The drawn lines cast into concrete appear very different from the intangible lines on paper, let alone on lines viewed on the computer screen. They are exciting and full; moments of creation petrified in time”, Rantanen says.

Silja Rantanen (b. 1955) is a pioneer of conceptual painting in Finland. Her works were featured in the 1986 Venice Biennale, themed Art and Science. She is known for works that address architectural space and observation. Rantanen has created public artworks for, among others, Stockholm Arlanda Airport in Sweden and the Embassy of Finland in Berlin. Katsura is the first public artwork by Rantanen commissioned for the City of Helsinki’s art collection.

The work belongs to the City of Helsinki’s art collection, which is managed and curated by HAM.