Timo Vaittinen’s (born 1977) video piece Keskuspuisto – Central Park was literally filmed in Helsinki’s Keskuspuisto (Central Park). In this work, day turns to evening, darkening into pitch-black night. The dark park provides a setting for the artist’s animated light phenomena, and the landscape begins to resemble the graphics of computer games, the spinning rides of an amusement park, or the landscape of neon lights in a city. The park removes itself from reality until daylight once again reveals a Finnish forest. The piece is filmed in stop motion technique in which the moving image is created on-site one shot at a time. Keskuspuisto – Central Park displays influences of minimalism and earth art.

Vaittinen has made several animations in which an existing space transforms into a three-dimensional drawing or a real space serves as the ground of a moving painting, an animation. His video pieces are often of painterly execution. In both his paintings and videos, Vaittinen fluently combines different imagery, related to religion or sub-cultures or of a modernist kind. Timo Vaittinen studied painting at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, from where he graduated in 2007.

Piia Oksanen

 

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