Lapland-based artist couple Raisa Raekallio (b.1978, Kittilä, Finland) and Misha del Val (b.1979, Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain) have been making paintings, drawings, performance art pieces, curatorial projects, and podcasts in collaboration since 2013. Raisa & Misha make paintings together, like musicians in a jam session, guided by a spirit of improvisation, affinity, and trust. Their working collaboration is an open-ended process of listening to each other and to the will of the paintings.
In this exhibition, their enigmatic, multi-layered, spirited paintings depict situations, in which a disparate bunch of personages inexplicably come to face each other. The works present flying lovers, cheeky monks, daring flamenco dancers, otherworldly tablecloths, a queue of beguiling characters idling in the snow, an old lady straight from one of Jacques-Louis David’s canvases in the Louvre. The paintings exude mysterious narratives, elusive meanings, and a warm sense of connection.
TWO FOOLS TO EUDAIMONIA, (Eudaimonia; a word used by the ancient Greeks to describe the condition of human flourishing or a life ‘well lived’), is a manifesto of the artist couple’s core values: friendship and coming together, romance, devotion to nature, and an appetite for coming to terms - through relentless waltz with the oil, the dust, and the vocabulary of painting - with our frail, clumsy, beautiful humanity.
The works Raisa & Misha produce are also a statement of how the artists, despite their different backgrounds, upbringings, and languages in Basque Country and Lapland, have found a reliable and meaningful place to come together: the arena of art making. The essence of Raisa & Misha's collaboration is equalitarian, and it is grounded in a trust in each other and in the process, a pliant sensitivity, a curious mind and an open heart.
Raisa Raekallio and Misha del Val’s jointly made paintings are part of private and public collections throughout Finland including Wihuri Foundation Collection; the Lars Göran Johnsson Collection at Turku Art Museum; Saastamoinen Foundation Collection at EMMA, Oulu Art Museum, Rovaniemi Art Museum, and Aine Art Museum, amongst others.
