Felipe Vásconez
7.-16.2.2025
Opening/Avajaiset 6.2.2025 18:00 – 20:00

An Echo in the Labyrinth invites audiences inside a labyrinth populated by multiple and shared voices. Like a child who picks a flower from the ground and looks at it repeatedly, hoping to find a hidden message, this exhibition is for Felipe Vásconez, the occasion to guide us into the intimacy of his creative process playfully.

The artist revisits the myth of the Minotaur, suggesting each of us inhabits an individual labyrinth within a broader, collective, and societal labyrinth. Felipe’s labyrinth is a place to experience his artistic work and, at the same time, his studio space where audiences can participate and engage with drawing.

Each morning, before going to work, Felipe dedicates 35 minutes to creating a drawing or finishing the one from the previous day. He commits these grains of time to experimentation, which he documents in several journals. These drawings, sketches, paintings, and collages—which explore the human figure, architecture, literature, and different landscapes—come together to find a new expression at Myymälä2.

An Echo in the Labyrinth is Felipe Vásconez’s first exhibition in Finland and includes the following works:

Calendar Almanac is a series of about 150 drawings made with ink on invoice paper between 2023-2024. In this series, drawing reveals itself as a meditative act of self-invention, through which Felipe records his ideas, research, and mundane activities. The artist decided to use invoice paper due to its omnipresence in our daily lives: it keeps score of time, our everyday purchases, and our traces. A long line drawn with fire and smoke from a palo santo stick weaves these drawings together, echoing Ariadne’s thread, a light that helps us find our way out from the labyrinth.

A selection of paintings created between 2021-2024 (acrylic on wallpaper or canvas).
Intuition is the guiding thread in Felipe’s approach to painting. He begins by choosing a drawing from his journals and imagining it as a painting. He then starts sketching with crayons, pastels, coloured pencils, or watercolours before deciding whether to move the work to a bigger format.

El destino de la carne (graphite on paper) is a series of 10 drawings created during the hardest period of Covid. Isolation and Felipe’s own experience as a migrant who’d just moved to Finland reduced space to a little metaphorical corner. Due to the restrictions and not knowing almost anyone in Helsinki, the artist saw himself floating in emptiness and found a way to express those emotions through these drawings.

An Echo in the Labyrinth was originally conceived as part of Each day hides a grain of Sunday, Circus Maximus’ 2024 programme curated by Daniela Pascual Esparza. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, the piece could not happen as originally planned. In 2025, a lighter version is possible through a collaboration between Myymälä2, Felipe Vásconez, and Circus Maximus.

Felipe Vásconez (1995) is a Helsinki-based visual artist. He studied at ITAE (Ecuador’s Superior Technological Arts Institute) and the University of the Arts in Guayaquil. He lives in Finland since 2019, where, due to migratory conditions, he doesn’t work as an artist yet keeps developing his practice autodidactically.

Felipe’s work is an imaginative drift that brings together emotion and technique. His creative process draws from a rigorous morning drawing practice before going to work, live drawing and bibliographic research. Felipe’s artworks emerge from sketches he produces daily in different mediums and formats, through which he experiments and matures his work.

Instagram: @vasconezfelipe_artspace_