Markku Keränen was born in the village of Salla in northern Finland which is divided halfway by the borderline with Russia today. The hard life experience of the time after the World War II  has influenced Markku's expression in art. Markku Keränen became a painter of unrepeatable life stories that revive in the form of paintings. Markku's paintings are not narrative descriptions but rather a synthesis of experience and its confrontation with the art of painting in the tradition of modern art.
On this path, Keränen left figurative Nordic expressive paintings to focus on the European painting traditions and the bright palette of colors in the light-color relation. Painting and story are combined in a new artistic experience.
On the exhibited paintings the figurative motif of the balladic story is reduced from a decorative band reminiscent film shots or a folk lace to a wide variety of flat color points. These points that are circles in the same time can be interpreted by the viewer very freely, according to the color scale used, the different size of the circles, and we can also observe the dynamics of their movement in the picture. The viewer is not limited either by the tradition of "reading" the image from the left to the right, or by the feeling of inadequacy to understand the artist's intention. Everything remains open to the free associations and personal experience of the viewer. At first glance, it is obvious that the artist let himself to surprise during the painting process and he is open to subconscious impulses.  The indisputable part of the overall expression is the poetic way of naming individual works and series of the  paintings . The pictures give always a very lively, comprehensive and surprisingly positive impression that is transmitted to the viewer from the first encounter.

Interestingly, Mark Keränen has painted his paintings by the egg tempera technique which is one of the oldest painting techniques at all and is very little used nowadays.

 
Petr Rehor/Curator