LIFESTYLE
2022. Spray paint on canvas. 50 x 61 cm.
LIFESTYLE
Santeri Lehto
Santeri Lehto
The approach to Santeri’s paintings is aesthetically pleasing for their subtlety, clarity and beauty. The simple forms are striking, the result of the direct, unhesitating but delicate action of a spray that seems to caress the canvas. A closer look reveals the associations of more or less recog nisable forms from an everyday environment, a union of objects and natural elements that one imagines surround the painter in his daily chores and define a way of life.
Born in Lappeenranta, Finland in 1982
Santeri Lehto graduated as a visual artist from the Lahti University of Applied Sciences’ Art Institute in 2013 and as a puppet designer from the School of Arts and Crafts in 2005. He has held many solo and group exhibitions, latest
at DOJO in 2021 and TM Gallery in 2019. He took part in the Young Artist’ Exhibition at Kunsthalle Helsinki in 2011 and his works are found in numerous private collections. Next solo exhibitions coming up 2022.
Lehto uses a kind of minimalism, and carefully considered analytical naivety,as his stylistic means. First the viewer notices the childish nature of the works and a certain kind of visual simplicity, but the immersion in the symbolic space of the paintings reveals their completely different, almost paradoxical nature. The deconstruction of Lehto’s paintings reveals how visual simplicity underscores the extremely complex and endless question and mystery of existence. So maybe the most important thing in Lehto’s works is not what you see, but what you can’t see.
2022. Spray paint on canvas. 110 x 120 cm.
A bit haiku, a bit mantra, a bit hieroglyphic; the ensembles depicted produce some form of visual poetry. The relationships of seemingly unconnected elements generate a mysterious unity remi niscent of improvisation and jazz tempos. The free associations and the carefree graphic style in voke the casual drawings on napkins, the almost unconscious doodles made during a telephone conversation.
Maite Muñoz
