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Biography
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Esko TIRRONEN
Born 1934 in Harlu, Finland. Lives and works in Kuusankoski, Finland.
"If I could just keep away from these bottoms, I'd be doing fine financially. You can live comfortably just by painting floral compositions, but the challenges and fascination of art make me do other things," says Esko Tirronen, explaining his production. "I may leave out the face in my figures – not because of any desire to achieve a surrealistic effect, but to avoid unnecessary individuality in them." Tirronen has said that he likes painting the female figure, because it is more tranquil and safer than the lumpy male body. He also suspects that women understand what he is trying to achieve better than men.
Biography
Esko Tirronen was born near Sortavala, which is now Russian Karelia. During the Interim Peace, when Tirronen was five, the family moved to Kuusankoski. As a child, he liked to draw, and during the war he sketched dogfights between fighter planes and pictures of the Wild West. His father, who was a filer by trade, wanted his son to become a metal worker, but after school Tirronen went to study carpentry at the trade school of the Kymi Company, despite the protests of his father. While still in school, Tirronen participated in the art circle at the local worker's evening school. Tirronen got his first oil paints from his elder brother when he was fifteen, and at the age of 16 he co-founded the Kuusankoski art society. The first time Tirronen's paintings were exhibited was at the Kuusankoski workers' institute in 1950.
Tirronen attended the school of the Fine Arts Academy from 1955–59, where he studied printmaking under Tuulikki Pietilä during his final year. His first show was held in Helsinki in 1959. Tirronen represented Finland at the Venice Biennial in 1962, and his work was featured in the ARS 61 and ARS 74 exhibitions. He was appointed the first Artist-in-Residence in the Province of Kymi in 1973. Tirronen taught painting at the Lahti Art School (currently the Institute of Design of the Lahti Polytechnic) from the mid-1970s, and was the headmaster of the school from 1982–85. Over the years, Tirronen has held more than twenty jobs, from Christmas tree salesman to paper mill worker, in addition to his artistic work. He is also an accomplished portraitist and stage designer.
Article
From Landscape to Women and Back
In the early 1960s, Esko Tirronen was one of the first artists in Finland to experiment with the opportunities offered by Informalism. He was fascinated by its purely painterly idiom free from the rules of composition and two-dimensionality. Like many others, Tirronen started with abstract landscapes. His breakthrough came in 1960, when he attracted attention at the Young Artists Exhibition, and received the State Award for Visual Art for the first time. The following year, Tirronen participated in the annual exhibition of the Finnish Artists' Association in the spring, the Paris Biennial of Young Artists, as well as the ARS 61 exhibition, and the following year he was selected to represent Finland at the Venice Biennial, together with Ahti Lavonen and Kain Tapper.
Painting with Coffee Grounds and Retouching Spray
"I think Informalism was a joyous discovery of a new freedom for the post-war generation, it discarded all old techniques, took up new materials, new forms, and renounced the principles of composition.I experimented with all kinds of recipes in an attempt to produce a thick mass. I finally succeeded in developing the right kind of emulsion from linseed oil, egg, and plastic glue, to which I added sand, pigment, coffee grounds, and sawdust. Most of those experiments are now in the Valkeala landfill, though." The older generation of artists saw Informalism as a form of radicalism that renounced the tradition of painting. In contrast, the young Informalists thought they were liberating themselves from under the yoke of conventional techniques and compositional rules. "It was kind of period of liberation. I had been aiming at an abstract idiom long before, until I finally decided to try to get results using pigment, sand, and a trowel. It seemed to work. I seemed to have an affinity for international art movements. – Later on, this trend went quite stale, when every bloody art teacher in the backwoods began styling themselves Informalists."
No sooner had the mainstream of artists in Finland begun to gobble up Informalism, than the pioneers, Tirronen among them, were already seeking for new forms of expression. The return to figurative art was a gradual shift through landscapes to human figures around the mid-1960s. Tirronen's production began to show influences from Photorealism and Pop Art. In his photorealistic work, Tirronen was liberal in the use of spray painting. His new theme was the faceless denizens of the city.
From Women to Landscapes
Tirronen is known above all for his large paintings of women depicted in a fragmentary way, often without the head. He intentionally shows his figures as objects. He has at times been criticised for this, and his paintings have been branded chauvinistic. On the other hand, his work has also been interpreted as reflecting the general trend of objectification in the modern world. Indeed, sometimes Tirronen simply gives his paintings the title Object. Tirronen's severe way of cropping his female figures divests them of the cloying saccharine quality often associated with erotic imagery. He arrogantly offers, for our perusal, parts of the female body in extreme closeup: knees, hips, breasts, or bottoms, all sheathed in silk. The world of advertising exploits the same female body parts, albeit with heads intact. In their time, Tirronen's female figures generated a great deal of discussion about the acceptable ways women can be portrayed.
Very often women's legs occupy a central position in Tirronen's work. Tirronen's treatment of the female leg is almost fetishistic. This is clearly different, for example, from Kimmo Kaivanto's way of using the hand as a universally human, asexual symbol in his works on the themes of war, totalitarianism, and violence. In contrast, the women's legs in Tirronen's paintings are headed in the direction of night club eroticism. Later on, Tirronen moved away from the portrayal of body parts towards landscape painting once more. His abstracted views perhaps portray an inner landscape rather than physical places.
Both Tirronen and Kaivanto belonged in the 1960s to a group of artists known as Maaliskuulaiset. Active in 1963–69, the group held joint exhibitions. Initially, its members were connected by their interest in Informalism, but later on the connecting factor was not so much stylistic interest as much as friendship and joint exhibitions. Tirronen's companion of the time, Ulla Rantanen, was also a member of the group.
In Defence of Artistry
Tirronen has been actively involved in artists' organisations, and has advocated the interests of the profession by defending the idea of an artist salary, for example. At the turn of the 1960s and '70s, Tirronen, who came from Kymenlaakso in south-eastern Finland, lived in Helsinki but he did not like the city. "I couldn't stand the stress in Helsinki. I was quite heavily involved in organisational work and it was too tiring." Tirronen returned to Kuusankoski when he was appointed Artist-in-Residence in the Province of Kymi in 1973. He held the post for the three-year period, but refused to continue. "All the teaching, lectures, talks, courses, all this considerably hampered my own work. That period as the provincial artist-in-residence made a clear impression on my production."
Esko Tirronen is one of the founders of the pacifist movement of artists in Finland. He firmly believes in the potential of an international artists' peace movement. "Nobody thinks that artists alone could safeguard world peace. But it's still part of the pacifist effort: the wider it ranges, the greater its impact."
Minna Turtiainen