13.12.2024 — 12.1.2025

Working in the studio is an endless puzzle, where there are several dozen two- and three-dimensional works being worked on at the same time, and around me an innumerable number of pieces and clips that might fit together. It’s a constant cutting, gluing, filing, compromise. It’s archiving and memory, creating a system so that sometimes something you’re looking for can be found easily. And in the end, it’s about finding, if not the perfect, then well-suited combination. The kind where everything finally falls into place – subject, color, size and all other possible variables are just as they should be. It’s also about discovering something new, when the abundance of material gives you an option that you didn’t even think to consider at first, and yet it’s better than what you originally set out to get. It’s when two pieces of paper that you didn’t think of together end up by chance next to each other and make a perfect pair. It’s the amount of things and their messy distribution so that these happy coincidences could happen from time to time. It’s humbling to realize that as an artist you don’t always have to make and create, you can only accept what you find. It’s a choice too.

For the past couple of years, I’ve arrived at my office, sat down and started going through all the material I have in my office: an endless amount of cut pieces of paper and magazines and books, where can I get more of them, and also everything three-dimensional that I’ve collected for my office from flea markets, junkyards and streets and forests. In addition to collages and paintings, the exhibition also includes clay works. I like the concreteness of clay and the fact that, as its shaper, I am always discovering something new. From clay, I create works from all sides, from accurate to clumsy, from beautiful to grotesque, that’s what the process gives me.

For the In a Time of Chimpanzees I Was a Monkey exhibition, I have approached the creation of the whole in a different way. I wanted to enjoy making art and being in the studio, so I didn’t set out to create a pre-planned exhibition, but did what came up and what felt natural. The idea was that chance should lead more, and I believe that the decisions I made during the process ultimately took the work in a certain direction. Some kind of red thread was born inside the body of work like a stealth, it didn’t have to be sought or forced. In the work, I find strange humor, concern for the state of the world and helplessness in the face of it.

The making of this exhibition has been supported by VISEK and Taike.

Aleksi Tolonen  (b. 1974) is a visual artist from Helsinki who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. He has participated in several exhibitions both in Finland and abroad, most recently in New York. In his art, Tolonen puts the material first, he has done two- and three-dimensional works, everything from serigraphy to large installations. At the center of his works is curiosity and playfulness, even though the starting points of the works are often serious.