MARI SUNNA (born 1972) is a completely distinctive artist. Every work by her reveals immediately from whose thinking, mind and brush it comes. The mark of her hand and the simultaneous power, sensitivity and precision of her painting are easy to recognise.
And yet she is in a continuous process of renewal. Time and again she surprises viewers with new subjects, new ways of painting and new emotions. What endures and remains recognisable is the somnambulistic assurance and sensuousness of her touch and the instinctive feel for what each painting needs in order to be completely itself.
Mari Sunna has previously painted young faceless girls in a charmingly rough manner. Disfigured, almost frightening faces. Stylised portraits combined from compact planes of colour. Multiarmed and multilegged figures expressing repeated movement. Depictions of figures and abstract formations made of small cellular units. Compositions of strong contrasts of colour balancing on the borderlines of the abstract and the figurative.
Her newest paintings are more immaterial and spiritual than Sunna’s earlier works. They seem to slip somewhere beyond language and therefore it is difficult to write about them. A characteristic of Sunna is how she instinctively applies all the knowhow and skills that she has gained from painting. In this sense, the paintings do not have any conceptual point of departure, of claiming something beyond the painting itself, bearing witness to something else than themselves. They just exist, breathing at the boundary of the material – which is what a painting is necessarily at all times – and the immaterial. The extremely thin layers of paint in the works lead at least me to think of innocence, nirvana, and wonderment at the human condition and the beauty of existence. And feeling a connection with something greater to which words cannot build a bridge.
