Juhani Tuominen
Works available
Lapin taiteilijaseura ryBasic information
b. 1949, Oulu
Painter
Residence: Rovaniemi
Contact information
Phone number: +358405927218
Email: juhani.tuominen@juhanituominen.net
Artist’s Statement
DREAM’S COMPASS
The sleeper embarking on a dream needs no passport, for dream dispels all borders, all distances.
Dream, rest, reconciles the points of the compass: North meets South, East West.
The armchair world of the exploring mind embraces the Oriental West, the Turkish Ultima Thule.
What then is the greatest, the universal dream?
Surely it is belief in life after death. Belief in a time in the hereafter that is new, strange, eternal, other.
Such time-dreams rest, sustained, in Juhani Tuominen’s burial rooms - waiting rooms of eternity.
The rooms may already be empty, neglected, like vanishing memories; but they are inhabited by time, slowly gathering.
There can be no urgency to reach the great eternity.
The wait under the green broadcloth is a dream with no end in view.
Those who have gone to their rest have surrendered all of their power to omnipotent time. Night and day gyre on above the rooms, undisturbed, true to their own time.
Yet time has its own little rewards for the living.
The light of the setting sun mounts fascinating spectacles of yellow, purple and turquoise on the white stucco wall.
Tuominen’s music of color is also without beginning and without end. It repeats itself; it revolves, like the sky, about its axis. Yet each image is an action, like a breath, a moment of experience that cannot be recaptured, but is remembered.
“That evening we stepped off the ferry onto the last dock on the Golden Horn. There, in front of Eyüp’s Mosque, the tombs of the pashas stood guard over times lived, the same life that flowed strident through the streets.
Dome-helmeted and stone-armored, the generals clashed with their last and superior adversary. The locks on the iron gates had already rusted open, and the wind had brought those first breaths of that sea of temporality in which everything ultimately drowns.”
Petri Vuojala PhD
The sleeper embarking on a dream needs no passport, for dream dispels all borders, all distances.
Dream, rest, reconciles the points of the compass: North meets South, East West.
The armchair world of the exploring mind embraces the Oriental West, the Turkish Ultima Thule.
What then is the greatest, the universal dream?
Surely it is belief in life after death. Belief in a time in the hereafter that is new, strange, eternal, other.
Such time-dreams rest, sustained, in Juhani Tuominen’s burial rooms - waiting rooms of eternity.
The rooms may already be empty, neglected, like vanishing memories; but they are inhabited by time, slowly gathering.
There can be no urgency to reach the great eternity.
The wait under the green broadcloth is a dream with no end in view.
Those who have gone to their rest have surrendered all of their power to omnipotent time. Night and day gyre on above the rooms, undisturbed, true to their own time.
Yet time has its own little rewards for the living.
The light of the setting sun mounts fascinating spectacles of yellow, purple and turquoise on the white stucco wall.
Tuominen’s music of color is also without beginning and without end. It repeats itself; it revolves, like the sky, about its axis. Yet each image is an action, like a breath, a moment of experience that cannot be recaptured, but is remembered.
“That evening we stepped off the ferry onto the last dock on the Golden Horn. There, in front of Eyüp’s Mosque, the tombs of the pashas stood guard over times lived, the same life that flowed strident through the streets.
Dome-helmeted and stone-armored, the generals clashed with their last and superior adversary. The locks on the iron gates had already rusted open, and the wind had brought those first breaths of that sea of temporality in which everything ultimately drowns.”
Petri Vuojala PhD
