2.5. — 24.5.2026

Becoming in Being.

In the spring of 2002, Mika and I sat on the terrace of the Hȏtel Chevillon artist residency in France and exchanged thoughts about life and art. According to Mika, art always condensed into three things: love, death, and loneliness.

Now, twenty-five years later, as I look at Mika’s new paintings, I wonder whether they speak of love, death, and loneliness. Perhaps—but not directly, rather in a mysterious way.

As if love were only just becoming love. As if death were only just becoming death. As if loneliness were only just becoming loneliness.

According to Aristotle, reality can be described with two words. Energeia describes how things are, and dynamis describes how things will come to be. Dynamis is thus potential; a tree already exists in the seed, even though it is not yet concretely there.

In the Buddhist tradition, it is said that form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. By form is meant everything we see and that seems enduring. Emptiness, in turn, means that everything is impermanent, indivisible, and constantly changing.

Emptiness manifests in time as form, which ultimately dissolves back into emptiness; everything flows in space-time. One form may last a second in the world, another thousands of years—yet one day it will disappear.

In Mika’s paintings, something is constantly coming into being. As if we were in khora, an in-between state, a place of emergence that cannot be defined. The surface of the canvas is a boundary where the world dreams itself; from the unknown, something is even now becoming. For the time being, it may be only color.

Joel Haahtela, writer

Mika Hytti (b.1961) graduated as a painter from Art School Maa in 1990, and also completed studies in art education at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki in 1997. During his thirty-year career, he has had several solo exhibitions, participated in many group exhibitions and taught at several art schools since the 1990s. His works are in the collections of Kouvola Art Museum, the State of Finland and HUS, as well as in many private collections. Hytti is a member of Forum Box, the Helsinki Artists’ Association and the Finnish Painters’ Union.