Timo Tolonen: Historical Pictures

Woodcut is quite an outdated technique. It is a slow and simple method. A handcarved plate makes a mark on paper and that's all. Just for this ancient quality, it is just right technique to visualise the phenomenons of our age in historical perspective.

Timo Tolonen tries to choose motifs that are essential for our time, but could be left without note even in the flood of pictures of the digital age. The landscape of Koli, Turku Castle or Eiffel Tower are not like that, because he is not interested in depicting sites that don't change through years, but slowly or quickly vanishing pieces of everyday life, things that someone could miss dozens of years after. Tolonen prefers very familiar items like bar terraces, student life or gas stations.

“I would like to see pictures of interiors of shops (especially toy departments) and cafés of my childhood and houses deconstructed years ago. It seems that my wish will not come true, but maybe I can make some other's wish happen. That wish is not spoken out yet and it is possible that someone who needs that kind of picture hasn't even been born yet. It is fair, because I have benefited a lot from the work of old time picture makers.”

In Finland the chance has been slow, almost unvisible, while it has been very dramatic in some other lands, like in Ukraine in 2022. The change has much to do with the feeling of melancholia. When the environment changes, you will notice your own aging. The familiar changes to unfamiliar, for that it ́s exhausting to change with the world around us.

“It could be exaggerated to say that my work is a process of grief, because the thing is quite natural, but that kind of nuance could be found.”

At its best, art is a dialogue between different eras, according to Tolonen. In that sense, the woodcut is a great device. There are multiple copies of the same work. If one gets destroyed, there are still many left. With appropriate storage the prints are very lasting. It could be seen even if the internet crashes or the power goes out. Even these things we used to take for granted are no longer as certain as they were just a few years ago.

Tolonen has made these works during the last few years. Some of the themes are a little older. The oldest is The Grill, which he has drawn in the yard of his parents about twenty years ago. The grill and the chairs have been dumbed down a long time ago. The skijump in the other picture has gone too and the gas station also. The memories stay in the pictures, at least a while.

Timo Tolonen (born in 1977, Kajaani) is a Finnish painter and graphic artist. Tolonen is known for his urban landscapes, but he lives in the countryside, in an old railway station in Runni village in Iisalmi. His works have been in exhibitions in Finland, Estonia, Germany and Hungary.