Jarmo Mäkilä. BOYS’ GAMES

Jarmo Mäkilä was born in 1952 and spent the best part of his childhood in Rauma on the West coast of Finland. His work in recent years has been devoted to discovering interesting paths back into his boyhood years. So diverse has been his approach that his paintings actually compose a multi-generational panorama of the psycho-history of Finnish boys in the 1950s. The cavalcade of his paintings and scale models leads us into the vast backyard of post war boyhood. Mäkilä deliberately views the past through the veil of present fantasy, which could already have been present “back then”. Mäkilä approaches boyhood from two directions: showing boys either in the middle of wild nature or in a variety of interiors. These two ways of treating the motif produce interesting differences. By using dissimilar ways of painting, light is shed on two entirely different worlds. In the forest the boys are possessed by wild mythical thinking, perform animal sacrifice rites and undergo endurance tests. Oaths are sworn, their potency enhanced by the powerful light filtering through the trees. Mäkilä brings the forest to glow in a medley of brown and grey-green hues. The gang of boys and its activities are submerged in the changing colours of the forest: in the dark, mist, smoke and light. As the gang retreats, it fades into an ever deepening grey fog. The illusory space of Mäkilä’s paintings present the world of tomorrow’s men from which girls, women and mothers are totally excluded. There is only the trampling generation and gender of boys. In the 1950s, girls belonged to another culture about which little was known. In the boys’ world dialogue was substituted by alikeness and like-mindedness.

Jarmo Mäkilä
BOYS’ GAMES
Kuratorin: Pia Hovi-Assad