Osmo Rauhala. The Book of Life

Is everything just chance, or is life governed by some structure or memory? The efforts of humanity to understand reality are a permanent source of inspiration in the art of Osmo Rauhala. This exhibition features three new series of paintings: Game Theory, The Book of Life and Memory. The common theme in all three is the relationship between language, image and nature. The works remind us that life’s memory remains a mystery to us. What is the ultimate reason for our actions?

Osmo Rauhala uses art to explore our ability to understand the reality we live in. In his paintings, Rauhala complements animal and plant symbolism with a pure world of abstract signs, pointing to the way we conceptualise and organise the things we see. Osmo Rauhala’s show consists new paintings whose common denominator is the relationship between language, image and nature. ”The series Game Theory is associated with the mathematical theory of the same name. The theory was first used in economics and has subsequently also been applied to psychology and biology. The visual inspiration of the paintings is the sliding puzzle, familiar from childhood, with one empty square and eight sliding pieces which have to be put in correct order,” says Rauhala.

”The other group of works, Book of Life, takes as its theme the language used to describe our genetic heritage. The four proteins designated by the letters ATGC form an enormous number of combinations which govern the behaviour of cells. The structure of the DNA was discovered already in the 1950s, yet the human genome still remains a mystery.”

Osmo Rauhala (1957) is an artist and a farmer who divides his time between his studio in New York and his organic farm in Siuro, Finland. In addition to oil paintings, he also works with graphic art and video. His most important public works in Finland are interior paintings in the church of St Olaf in Tyrvää, which Rauhala created jointly with artist Kuutti Lavonen in 2005–2009.

Osmo Rauhala
The Book of Life