Sampo Apajalahti

Sampo Apajalahti, b.1980 Järvenpää Finland, is interested in themes such as time passing, past, time, place, and visual and technical possibilities of painting in general. His painting process can be described as slow & troublesome, and it contains several different stages. Apajalahti`s paintings are usually based on precise observational drawings, and the observations are transfered to a larger canvas by using specific calculations. The sharp lines discovered in his paintings, similar to the ruler lines in observational drawings, are made by taping. The colors and values are usually made up his own mind. Apajalahti´s painting process includes a lot of measuring, calculating and taping, and therefore traditional paintbrush and palette work is only one part of the process. Nevertheless, it´s important to him that the finished painting is traditional oil painting. In his works Apajalahti is combining different ways of working: Observational drawing, traditional color painting, compulsive taping, photographing, and occasionally even expressive painting. His works often contain “a picture within a picture” which is used to challenge the ways of looking an artwork. Usually in his paintings there are at least two different subjects: The spatial painting in itself, and the subject of the pictures shown inside the painting. In recent years, as a reference for “pictures within pictures” in his works, Apajalahti have used e.g. his childhood photos, childhood paintings, snapshots of tags in bar toilets, or 1980´s abstract paintings. In some of his paintings Apajalahti also paints illusion of slip of paper, that show notes or sketches from the earlier stage of his painting process.

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