Paul KajanderIso Kokko

One of the most-explored niche terms in art-historical writing since the 1980s has been Georges Bataille’s concept of the formless. Theorized after the fact as an operational force in the work of artists such as Alberto Giacometti in the 1930s, Lucio Fontana in the 1950s, and Cy Twombly in the 1960s, the formless has been carried through decades to describe that which simultaneously gives and takes away form, as though a visual metaphor is not to be taken for granted. “What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.”Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927 — 1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 31. The formless has been established with implications of base materialism, entropy, isotropy, and the space between life and death. Bataille expertly synthesized the fascination with the abject in his work, being unafraid to offer up the soft underbelly of philosophy. In Iso Kokko (Finnish for “big bonfire”), Paul Kajander’s solo exhibition at Franz Kaka in Toronto, the properties of formlessness as they relate to materials and human life, and the tendency to be enamoured with the gaps between life and death, become the basis for a thoroughly researched body of work. Coupling biographical elements with research into histories of photography, anthropology, and medicine, Iso Kokko is a fascinating study of bodily reconstruction and exploration of the micro and macro that moves between the materials of life and those of death. Upon entering the space, viewers are greeted by a vertically hung banner, reading “VITAL PLANET” in large, red letters. Salvaged from a now-closed health store on Toronto’s Lower Jarvis St., it makes up one half of Out of Business/Out of Body (2022). The flipside consists of an exact replica of the banner, overlaid with a row of spacesuits charting NASA’s development of EVA (extravehicular activity) suits to be worn outside of a spacecraft. For Kajander, this pairing of imagery is intuitive as a criticism of billionaire-funded space exploration in search of Planet B — a replacement for our current vital planet — while the rest of us remain on Earth with the consequences of climate change and long-standing inequality. Paul KajanderIso Kokko, exhibition view, Franz Kaka, Toronto, 2022.Photo: LFdocumentation, courtesy of the artist &Franz Kaka, Toronto Paul KajanderOut of Business/Out of Body (detail), installation view,Franz Kaka, Toronto, 2022.Photo: LFdocumentation, courtesy of the artist &Franz Kaka, Toronto Kajander’s handwoven textile works, such as Havers (2022) and Tuhkauksen Jälkeinen (2022), draw from the labour of Kajander’s grandmother, a Finnish immigrant to Victoria, BC, who worked as a weaver and seamstress. Tuhkauksen Jälkeinen features imagery of cremated human bone from a scanning electron microscope. The ambiguity of the image and its strange, undulating forms also point to certain visual gestures in the work of artists such as Jean Dubuffet, whose Art informel works often mentioned in early writings on the formless in visual art. A Jacquard red pillow slumped on the floor, Havers resembles a photomicrograph of a transverse section of the femur, taken from Osteologia nova (1691) by Clopton Havers, which describes the structure of bone and its intricate vessel systems (the Haversian system) in great detail. The relationship among textiles, skin, and other bodily tissues, all similar in their porous, delicate, and layered characteristics, is made clear. With a certain consideration for durability alongside this delicateness, Kajander notes, through his research, that some of the most successful prototypes for NASA’s early EVAs were handsewn by seamstresses from Playtex. In many ways a second skin, the textile is seen here as a protective outer covering much like the skin of the human body. Paul KajanderLossy Tissue (detail), installation view,Franz Kaka, Toronto, 2022.Photo: LFdocumentation, courtesy of the artist &Franz Kaka, Toronto Focusing on the body’s insides from the outside, the work seeing as searing in (2020) is a small graphite drawing of a photograph that Kajander encountered as a child: an image of his father performing an investigative autopsy. Distorted through Photoshop but drawn hyperrealistically, the stretched inner tissues of a cadaver come out towards the frame, aided by two pairs of hands in the background. The products of life in their deathly form are confrontational. Revealing that this was the first image he had seen of a corpse, Kajander discloses a sort of childhood fascination with death and the inner workings of the human body that informs a main thread throughout the exhibition. The centrepiece of Iso Kokko, hard parts with x.s. emblshmnt (2022), shows a figure sitting with both knees up, holding on at the ankles and wearing a bespoke hazmat suit printed with images of facial reconstructions passed through Photoshop’s “artistic” filter to appear like charcoal drawings. Made with components of an anatomical skeleton underneath, the figure’s skin is composed of melted pigmented wax. The whites of the eyes and green of the iris fall down the figure’s cheek; the lips have melted away, but a forced, orthodontic smile remains. The fingers are fused together. It is as though this person has been frozen in time in front of the big bonfire, appearing like the synthesis of Bataille’s notion of the moment when life slips away into death. To take a line from Andrea Actis’s exhibition essay: “If you don’t end the world, it will be ended for you.” The implications of burning and being burned, taking things apart and building them up from base materials, resonate throughout as an organic curiosity about what both sustains and destroys life on microscopic and macroscopic levels, as well as what composes the space in between. Painstakingly detailed charcoal drawings of early craniofacial reconstruction techniques are reminiscent of medical illustration and its purpose of discovery through the study of death. The emblem of fire recurs throughout in embroidered patches, the subject of cremation, allusions to apocalyptic climate change, and the title of the show itself. As an elemental source of light and destruction, fire operates as the two-fold fear and curiosity of abjection. It is ultimately the form of the formless, the giver of life and death. Angel Callander, Paul Kajander

Paul Kajander
Iso Kokko

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