Päivi Takala (born 1970) applies tape to canvas and waits for it to start to peel and for the picture to unravel, using this partly unravelled picture as the model for oil paintings. This time, a central theme is the grid, a core motif in modern abstract art. There are two superimposed grids, occasionally so that the grids of different colour are distinct, and at times with one of the grids remaining almost unnoticeable.

The other main theme consists of “paper on painting” works, which appear to have a folded and then opened piece of paper covering a painting visible through holes cut in it. Päivi Takala’s works involve several levels operating with the same visual intensity. There is the original visual motif made with tape, its partial disintegration and a picture of this painted in extremely close detail. There is a folded and opened concertinaed piece of paper, holes cut in it and what can be through them, and a painted picture of all this. When the painting is finished, viewers will decide how to see it, what to consider to be its subject, and at what level to focus the gaze.

These paintings function both quickly and very slowly: their main visual stimuli have an immediate effect (the grid, the surface of a painting visible through a hole in a piece of paper), but they also contain subtle elements, both literary and visual, that will open up only through reflection and by taking time to look at them.

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