Underneath the Horizon

Ville Räty paints with vibrant colours, big gestures and bold contrasts. His works may divide opinions, but they leave no one cold. Their arrogance is either loved or hated. Their romanticism is effortless. Räty is able to be both nostalgic and futuristic at the same time. He shows us a future made of pop culture decadence, but also of the pain and anxiety of the post-disaster environment.

Räty’s art has been on display in numerous solo exhibitions. The 2018 Mänttä Art Festival included a series of four large paintings. Large pieces have also been acquired in the collections of Tampere Art Museum and Aine Art Museum in Tornio. A very large artwork was also commissioned for the 20th anniversary of the Sibelius Hall in Lahti.

Räty’s painting style is excellently suited for the large scale. The graphic elements, stencils and relief prints that he utilizes breathe beautifully on a large canvas. In this Gallery Halmetoja exhibition, large new pieces take the lead role. Their world is more referential than before. Symbols have become more abstract and the landscape has turned into colour surfaces with a mysterious, almost entirely abstract world underneath. The roots of the landscape are somewhere that we cannot recognize as a landscape anymore.