Mari Rantanen also tends to the geometrically abstract, but in a more plainly figurative direction. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2004), one of a suite of eight large paintings in portrait format, she depicts a form of fantasy architecture in bright pastel colours, with a superimposed, decorative pattern. The title is taken from Milan Kundera’s novel about the Prague Spring of 1968. Because of the brilliant, flickering colours, the architecture seems to float, ethereal. It is decorative and refined—an abstract painting in the spirit of colour-field painting and Op art, a geometric abstraction that engages and confuses the eye. Her images appear to swim before our eyes. There are echoes of Claude Monet’s long series of paintings of Rouen cathedral in various lights. Yet there are also shades of Disney about it, and India—references that would be unthinkable in the strictest abstract phase in late Modernism. Instead of purity, Rantanen has chosen a complex, overlapping, and associative approach.
Kristoffer Arvidsson from The Collection Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg 2014
