Nearly all of these paintings were made for my first one-man show in 1981 at Galleria Katariina, the Helsinki Artists’ Association’s gallery. I had studied art and design for seven years and had explored many media and genres of painting, both figurative nd abstract. Colour had been my main motivation in creating pictures from an early age. At this point I had become so immersed in colour that I felt that I had to find an idiom, where I could push all the other elements of a painting, such as subject matter, composition and texture, to the background. But how to get rid of composition, unless the canvas is just one flat colour, without ending up in pure decoration? My solution was to opt for a universal geometric shape, the isosceles triangle, and base all the form-realtonships, incuding the canvas, on it. I felt that a rectangular canvas, mainly due to its history, always somehow suggests a ‘view onto something’ and therefore requires a spatial composition of some elements. A triangular division is much less recognizable as a ‘picture’.

One of my teachers in the last year of studying at the Art Academy School was Matti Kujasalo, a prominent Finnish Constructivist. Another was Timo Aalto, a Constructivist or Concretist and a master of extremely delicately tuned colour relationships. I also befriended at the time Lars-Gunnar Nordström, a Finnish pioneer of Constructivism. I guess all three influnced the way these works turned out. Kuutti Lavonen wrote a very appreciative review about the show in the leading newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, with the title “Jumala on kolmio”, God is a triange. It was pun on “Jumala on kauneus”, God is beauty, the title of a novel by Paavo Rintala about the painter Vilho Lampi, Lavonen explained. I was, of course, very flattered.