Born 1972 | Lives and works in Heinola, Finland
In his vivid, dissonant paintings, Roy Aurinko translates the impulses and flows of the body—some chaotic, some subdued. In unspooling orchestrations of color and gesture, forms evoke various engagements with speed, precision, and care. Some marks are fluid, others scratched, dripped, or scumbled. In places, meandering lines and labyrinthian patterns are seemingly carved or pressed into passages of impasto, creating another dimension of marks in relief. Aurinko, who lives and works in Heinola, Finland, works with an admixture of acrylic, oil, pastel, and cement, generating a tangible expression of materiality. Each canvas bears a sense of natural processes, suggesting the mutability and fluctuation of our environment, as well as sublime moments of order and organization. A scientific approach undergirds his relationship to painting: “It’s utterly beautiful how theories are put together, tested and certified,” he observes. “I’d like to think a similar kind of method applies to my artistic work. Observation, experimentation, analysis.” A composition might recall the pattern of gradually evolved rust, a garden past its prime, a bloom of mold, or ancient graffiti painted inside caves. Aurinko’s palette likewise mimics the surprising hues that occur in nature, evoking lichen, viscera, petals, fog, and mud. With his accumulations of inchoate scrawls, rhythmic linework, and amoebic islands of erratically textured color, the artist suggests flows of indeterminate meanings or concepts briefly grasped. Glyph-like forms emerge, seeming to gesture toward language, but remain unconnected and diffuse, unable to establish cohesion. These paintings present as fields of primordial events that might be cellular, ecological, or cosmic—whatever scale we, the viewers, bring to the compositions, we are prompted to consider the material of our own bodies as they interconnect with the material realities of our surroundings, all of it caught up in dynamic flux.
