Vital Debris

2025
Solo exhibition
Porvoo Art Hall (FI)

Vital Debris, 2025, solo exhibition, Porvoo Art Hall

Vital Debris, 2025, solo exhibition, Porvoo Art Hall

Vital Debris, 2025, solo exhibition, Porvoo Art Hall

Vital Debris, 2025, solo exhibition, Porvoo Art Hall

Vital Debris, 2025, solo exhibition, Porvoo Art Hall

Vital Debris, 2025, solo exhibition, Porvoo Art Hall

Vital Debris, 2025, solo exhibition, Porvoo Art Hall

Motherboard, 2025, acrylic, aluminium powder, marble powder, pigment on linen, 120x100x5cm

Arranged Remains, 2025, acrylic, aluminium powder, marble powder, pigment on linen, 120x110x5cm

Six Pairs of Hollow Eyes, 2025, acrylic, aluminium powder, marble powder, pigment on linen, 120x100x5cm

Archival Remain, 2025, acrylic, aluminium powder, marble powder on linen, 100x120x5cm

Dextral and Sinistral (diptych), 2025, acrylic, aluminium powder, marble powder, pigment on linen, 54x43x3cm (x2)

Vital Debris, 2025, acrylic, aluminium powder, marble powder, pigment on linen, 120x110x5cm

Mammary Array, 2025, ink on paper, framed, 41x33x3cm

Eyedra, 2025, ink on paper, framed, 41x33x3cm

Ocular Sheet, 2025, ink on paper, framed, 41x33x3cm

Haptic Surface, 2025, ink on paper, framed, 41x33x3cm

Dermal Spread, 2025, acrylic, aluminium powder, marble powder, pigment on linen, 180x150x5cm

Synthetic Terrain, 2025, acrylic, aluminium powder, marble powder, pigment on linen, 180x150x5cm

Trypophobia, 2025, acrylic, aluminium powder, marble powder on linen, 180x150x5cm

Gently Displaced Outer Layer, 2025, ink on paper, framed, 41x33x3cm

Nasal Zone, 2025, ink on paper, framed, 41x33x3cm

Paired Structures, 2025, ink on paper, framed, 41x33x3cm

No Response from Pupil, 2025, ink on paper, framed, 41x33x3cm

Exhibition text

Taru Happonen paints like an archaeologist, examining satellite images, cells, motherboards, and skin surfaces from the perspective of another time. In the paintings, hardly anything human can be seen. She performs a dissection of an environment caught in a stage of slow collapse and mutation.

As one can read daily in the news, we are living in an age of planet-wide destruction. At the same time, however, new biological, geological, and synthetic species emerge: plastic-eating bacteria and new types of stone formed from the fossil industry waste. The living, the non-living, and the artificial blend into one another, this era merging with the one to come. The world changes regardless of human feelings, moving toward a time beyond human existence.

Sometimes change only becomes perceptible by shifting the scale of observation. This is the fundamental movement in the exhibition: zooming in and out of the human experience.

Hole- and eye-like forms recur in the works at different scales, as do circuit-like diagrams resembling circuit boards. Similar structures also repeat in nature across scales. Tree leaves contain “eyes” at the microscopic level, as do cells. Networks of neurons resemble the traces on a computer motherboard, and both resemble satellite images of airports and cities. These structures optimise the transmission of signals and energy efficiency. Nervous systems with their synapses, transistors with their logic gates, and cities with their street networks demonstrate how the regularities of physics scale across levels.

The works incorporate marble, stone, and aluminium powder, along with glue, paper, and wood. In the choice of materials, a similar kind of interweaving takes place as in the scales and temporal dimensions depicted in the works. Their colours and materials adapt to the concrete and aluminium of Porvoo Art Hall, just as a living species always adapts to its prevailing environment. The exhibition explores the layers of deep geological time and movements on scales beyond human experience, and as a whole it is at once tender and unsettling.

Reaching towards the sculptural, the paintings evoke the way two-dimensional surfaces become three-dimensional forms by being wrapped or folded. When the surface of the beings is peeled away and unfolded, as happens in several of Happonen’s works, one returns to the two-dimensional plane.

The end of painting on canvas has long been declared, and art education today emphasises expanded forms of visual art. Happonen demonstrates that painting executed on a rectangular canvas still holds power. Even if the works appear non-human, they remind us why humankind has gazed at painted surfaces for thousands of years: because for a moment they can transport us from the midst of the visible to where we cannot see.

Text: Pontus Purokuru

Artwork photos: Angel Gil

Installation photos: Anna Niskanen