Niklas Rämö (1988) is a Finnish visual artist based in New York State. He has produced independently since 2008, having exhibited in Helsinki, Miami, and New York. Today he lives in the Hudson Valley, and his work can be found worldwide.
Recent work emerged from dedicated production and the examination of past practices. Looking at previous work, it becomes clear that composition favors isolated subjects. This insistence on separation is designed for unobstructed observation. Detachment from its environment exposes a subject for the benefit of our analysis. But these laboratory conditions are not created to further a scientific interest, instead they are made to align the subject with a type of visual language. Solitude creates mystery and nostalgia. Combined with a warm and neutral color palette, the isolated subject arrives at a graceful state of rest. My intention is to alter perception of the ordinary using light and circumstance.
In 2022 I relocated from Brooklyn to Upstate New York. I was eager to work in this new environment, but initial experiments with nature proved to be exploitative. Tedious compositions depicted a forest in routine detail. I was still a foreigner. Some effective works from this era linger on the website.
Production turned inward, searching for an appropriate subject. A body of work explored the aesthetic of gesture, followed by a brief incursion into the abstract, both represented here as well. Soon after, I found myself back in the wild.
Work started in the forest. A sympathetic image arrived on the canvas, but it carried a deeper narrative. This quality appears in four recent works illustrating decay. The changing season strips October of its leaves. Caterpillars plague Odds and Ends. Darkness consumes Canopy, and Hydrangea is fading one leaf at a time. When these works are considered together, something else emerges alongside the deterioration. The enduring posture of nature. While the forest may be choked from light, devoured by insects, or stripped bare by the coming winter, every limb and available surface remains outstretched, craning towards the light. This may be a common observation, but it encourages us to examine our own stance when challenged by circumstance. Baked into the very foundation of life is the freedom to choose our attitude. See it in the bend of the smallest weed pushing out from the sidewalk. Endurance is universal, and art can remind us of our responsibility to manifest the same.
Vesper features a visual quality found in past compositions. Depicted is a common sight, the setting sun illuminates a tree. But unlike many peculiar things examined in past work, here is a very ordinary subject. This is not an artfully crumbling building, or a kitchen sink, or the backseat of a car made sympathetic by a trick of light. This light has a gravity, it is solemn and sincere when it mingles in the crown of Vesper. This is a confrontation with a perspective not yet found in past work. We are witness to a timeless display, a daily occurrence in the forest stretching back to the primordial past. The forest lives and dies, changing with time, but we know how well it resembles itself. Each day the fading light returns, illuminating a familiar nature in the same color that inspires our better selves. Vesper, like other recent work, reminds us to observe the broad currents of life, the moments present for all living things.
For years, I was a part of Brooklyn just as Brooklyn was a part of me. It was a comfortable symbiosis. Relocating upstate transformed my environment, myself, and the work that was an extension of both. The city and its composite parts were easy to isolate and examine, but this investigation was ill adapted to the woods. Familiar methods were frustrated, and buckled under a perceived lack of substance. It became necessary to discard an ego that protested association with a tree.
But this subject was immune to isolating tactics. In order to comprehensively portray a tree, it required defining attributes that reflect broad patterns in life. Seasonal change, manifested beauty and death ever present. This was unfamiliar, even a consideration of past portraiture contains little to suggest such a profound commonality. A shared human experience may be present, but it hides behind a veneer of society, identity, and personality. Exposed and undaunted, nature radiates universal currents. The pursuit in common to all living things. Sometimes we feel a part of it, often we forget how it carries us along. But we can find its presence in the sincerity of a tree.
© 2024