Timo Heino (FI): Bearded Virgin

The sun, the moon, the stars, fire as well as a TV, a computer screen, illuminated ads and neon lights – the majority of commercial visuality and created images – are based on the fact of looking at material as light or looking at the light source and the attraction of light. Looking at light gives us an impression of looking at something outside from inside. Even if we were watching TV located on the back of a room, we would have a feeling of looking at something which is outside – the outside world. The light, external, attracts us and interiorizing it, the enlightenment or turning into light are subjects that can be found in many religions. Technology required for the ”non-material consumption” actually needs massive production based on raw materials. What are the grounds for the desire to become estranged from the primary existence of substances and for the fascination of the artificial reality of the illusionary world filtered by technology?

Heino has made this work of an illuminated billboard, on the light surface of which he has glued his own body hair and made a human figure out of them. These ”animal-like” hairs are a symbol of a human body, a fleshless drawing pierced by a blinding light; a relic of the lost body merged in light.

Timo Heino (FI)

In his art, Timo Heino (b.1962) investigates the material world. He has juxtaposed contrasting substances perceived as representing different categories: bright synthetic acrylic plastics and organic substances he has gathered from the forest, floor dust and clinically clean mirrors, hair and car tires, bones and stainless steel. His focus is on the history, identity and future of substances, and on the way their symbolic meaning and people’s relationship to them has changed in different eras.