Helsinki
After years of producing wall-dependent compositions—works that resemble hangings, misaligned Venetian blinds, wooden screens, and rows of exposed pipes—Elina Autio has turned to the floor. While the departure seems unexpected, these new works also recall furnishings, specifically small tables or beds, and closely relate to earlier projects. Her recent exhibition, “REST,” whose title reinforced the atmosphere of motionlessness projected by the objects, was permeated by an irrefutable quiescence. At first it felt like being stuck in the doldrums, but certain aspects of the works—their refined assembly, vivid plays of color, and material juxtapositions—captured the attention and refused to let go.
The broad strips of precisely cut and spray-painted corrugated paper that cover the steel frames of Autio’s meticulously layered works generate imaginings of excessively draped tables, flows of long hair, and static fountains. Though the crisscrossing strips running across the top surfaces are woven to create an impression of fabric, lengths of unwoven surplus cascade down on all sides and, in a few cases, run out across the floor. These attributes seem to intimate fluidity, ebb and flow, and the predictable unpredictability associated with the movement of water. The curled ends of Change color (all works 2024), in particular, evoke waves.
But things are not so cut and dried. Color application and the extended role of the metal understructures moderate this reading. In some works, Autio takes advantage of the paper’s fluted surface by spraying opposite sides of the ridges in different colors. For example, within the top weave of Overgrown, one set of strips consists of near monochrome colors, whereas those in the transversal set appear green when viewed from one side and burgundy from the other. Her skill with color and the breadth of her palette are admirable—from the muted tones that grant Fallen Leaves its somber richness to the ragged energy of the kaleidoscopic Guilt Quilt, and all points between these extremes. Meanwhile, the open understructures, composed of stackable units, permit additional paper strips to be threaded through every level. This process culminates in a dense fullness and the irregularity associated with overspill.
Neither wholly abstract nor referential, Autio’s work stymies interpretation as well as classification, though familiarity with her methods of fabrication can point to clues. Some say her practice focuses on sculptural painting, rather than assemblage, painted sculpture, or process art. While that label calls up Lynda Benglis’s poured accumulations, Sam Gilliam’s draped canvases, Anne Truitt’s colorful columns, or Eric Cameron’s “Thick Paintings”—works based on ordinary objects that, after being painted with thousands of layers of gesso, gradually morphed into weird shapes—it fails to resolve the inherent ambiguity of Autio’s structures.
Autio herself seems to relish this situation. Her exhibition statement, for example, only discusses the ventilation system in her studio, which had become blocked with paint and required maintenance. Particulate matter had accumulated inside, solidifying into grayish chunks that, when broken apart, revealed multi-hued cross-sections of her painting history. The story offers a link to “REST,” in the sense that this word is synonymous with surplus, residual matter, odds and ends. The term—analogous with inactivity and downtime, a pause—is also interchangeable with words such as “pedestal” and “shelf,” things that provide support. The associations are vague and multilayered, but they exist.
The presence of a small number of steel sculptures appeared questionable at first. Their crudely scarred surfaces—the result of grinding, drilling, and the linear application of solder—elicited mystery, connoting physical, emotional, or mental trauma. All are called Carrier, which, it turned out, is also the title of a paper and steel structure. Thus, instead of simply manifesting contradictions—durable versus fragile, for instance—the two bodies of work are inextricably connected. Far from elucidating some of the potential meanings within this equivocal series of works, things turn out to be just as, if not more, indefinite, and subject to continuing rumination.
Elina Autio’s work is on view in the group exhibition “Experiments in Concretism” at EMMA (Espoo Museum of Modern Art) through March 2, 2025.
