SPIRITUS EUROPÆUS 1980-2000, Rax Rinnekangas
A Photographer´s retrospective on spiritual illumination and ordinary people from the fringe cultures of Europe.
For last twenty years, Rax Rinnekangas has been using his camera to capture the ordinary people of Europe behind the news pictures, people from Utsjoki to Gibraltar and from the Atlantic to the Urals. This exhibition shows the results; how do people look in a psychological light? What about the everyday elements without people in them at all in different cultural circles where different languages are spoken?
Rax Rinnekangas’ camera has looked at light in fourteen different cultures. Out of the results grows a journey respecting the special charasteristics of different cultures, a journey towards the light of the old continent and into the soul landscape of Europe that lies behind the news.
In Rinnekangas’ photographs light has the leading role. Henri-Cartier Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ is replaced by ‘decisive light’. The light of a landscape, contre-jour, the light thrown by a single lamp, the lifeless laboratory light and the impudence of a neon light create an atmosphere of expectation, premonition, unexpectedness or threat.
Rinnekangas does not construct nor set things. His ideal is an image that, in fact, says nothing. His artistic genre is ‘nadaism’, a philosophy of eptiness and meaningless. Anything is good enough to be the surface of a wall, flicker of a shadow. This very demarcation of the boundaries of meaninglessness and ambiguity, unimportance and importance, is the content of his photographs.
Rinnekangas has worked also as a film director, a journalist and as a writer: he has published books, novels and essays. This year he is making three movies. Rinnekangas has had over twenty exhibitions, some of them international, and has published eight photographic books. He has received the State Prize for Photography 1989 and the State Prize for Literature 1992.
SPIRITUS EUROPÆUS -exhibition was seen at Amos Anderson Art Museum in sipring 2000 and at Reykjavik Art Museum, Island, in summer 2000. For Pori Art Museum Rinnekangas has made a special nine meters long Le Nord-Sud Express photographic train.