Ola Kolehmainen – Reviews

In a statement made in 2002, the Finnish artist Ola Kolehmainen, born 1964, claimed that Minimal Art was his great love. Coming from an artist who works with photography, this claim must initially come as a surprise; we imagine Minimal Art to be about three-dimensionality and abstraction, and photography to be about two-dimensionality and - broadly speaking - the depiction of reality. Can these two opposing tendencies be brought into alignment? Or, can there be a Minimalist photography?

It appears so. Sol LeWitt, one of the foremost proponents of Minimal Art, has also worked with photography. In 1997 he published the book Photogrids, in which he collected together photos of a diverse range of grid forms, from houses, windows, façades, floors and ceiling constructions and assembled them into an anthology. Grids are also the subject of many of Kolehmainen´s photos. The difference however is that his photographs appear less cursory, less snapshot, than those of LeWitt; rather, they are large-format, technically perfect pieces, largely isolating the grid-like façade structures from their particular spatial context and holding them captive within a surface In this way the works consciously avoid any narrative or anecdotal elements. Nevertheless the chosen frame is still large enough for us to recognize that these are buildings, not simply abstract surfaces. The photographs are thus not trying to make a puzzle out of reality, but they do shift our perspective. The structure - the grid evenly spanning the façade - —becomes a phenomenon in itself.

The surroundings of each façade do to an extent however slip through the back door, in the form of slightly - sometimes highly - distorted reflections of nearby buildings, which anchor the image in its urban context, and also introduce an element of irritation. The structure´s dominance is knocked a little off-balance, as it is suddenly overloaded with reflections, indicating a spatial context without making it explicitly apparent.

The viewer is therefore drawn into a complex interplay of space, structure and proportion, and as such into a perceptual model characteristic also of Minimal Art. In this sense Ola Kolehmainen´s photographs can indeed be understood as Minimalist. And this would still be true even if Sol LeWitt had never published his Photogrids.

Martina Fuchs

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