“A few years ago, I looked at the bright pale potato flowers in the light twilight of a summer evening and thought that they looked just like stars. The five-lobed flower shape appeared in my paintings and stayed there to vary. Obviously, it can be seen as referring to the starry sky – the extreme edge of human perception – but also to the processes of the earth, the space of the soil.”
Linda Roschier’s ancestor, Valentin Rossier, a soldier returning from the war, arrived in Finland 300 years ago. By chance, potatoes also arrived in Finland with the soldiers returning from the war. The whole nation’s vegetable appears sympathetic and relatable, on the other hand it is a powerful symbol that takes thoughts to emigration, the years of hunger, the nation’s food. The realization of the geographical synchronicity of the ancestor and the potato led Roschier to start using the potato as part of his art, right up to cultivation.
The Painter’s bed in the center of the gallery invites the viewer to look at the flowing passage of time from the perspective of rest and dreaming. The tools of work, violence, play and decoration spread on the bed open a multifaceted relationship between man and the other.
In Roschier’s multi-hued paintings, you can recognize fragments from different times and places. The color surfaces and the formal language of the paintings are dreamlike, like warm memories that you want to return to again and again. They have wistfulness but intensity, a sense of purpose that guides the viewer’s train of thought in subtle ways. Roschier’s works have a palpable powerlessness and joy that can be found in small everyday encounters and details.
As humanity walks its familiar paths, surfaces and earth are shaped over time, the stars continue to twinkle in the sky and the potato continues to grow. But is a person an empty canvas on which the same picture is drawn over and over again?
Milja-Liina Moilanen
Linda Roschier (b.1979) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts with a Master of Fine Arts in 2020. She has most recently presented her works at Helsinki Contemporary in the group exhibition Modern Love. There have been private exhibitions, e.g. In Huuto gallery, Exhibition Laboratory Project Room. Linda Roschier is one of the artists of the Norwegian Painters’ Association’s Finnish Painters project.
The exhibition’s seed potatoes will be donated to exhibition visitors to be cultivated during the last weekend of the exhibition.
