August, 22 - November 2, 2025

Porvoo Comes to Visit

At the Kondas Centre, an exhibition of four artists from Porvoo is on display. It is part of a larger initiative, “Porvoo Comes to Visit”. From our (Viljandi) twin town Porvoo, a larger delegation has arrived: with the support of the local art association, their artists are presenting their works in various exhibition spaces across Viljandi – at the Sakala Centre, City Gallery, Raamatukoi, Guest Gallery, Old Water Tower, and the Kondas Centre.

In one of the Kondas Centre’s halls, the works of Pauliina Turakka Purhonen and Petri Hytönen are intertwined, while in the two temporary exhibition rooms the art of Sampsa Indrén and Jarmo Vellonen is displayed.

Pauliina Turakka Purhonen (1971) is a painter by training, working across several media, but best known for her soft sculptures. According to the artist, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what led her to working with textiles. At first, she was drawn to other forms of expression, most of all performance art. But one cannot do everything – especially when children are small and life fragmented. At such times, you patch and mend things as best you can. Sewing, she says, gathers fragments into a whole. 

Performance and painting, on the other hand, are processes of thought; both require time and space, a kind of suspension. Textile works are labor-intensive. Creating them by hand is slow, yet enjoyable. Turakka Purhonen’s sculptures are often portraits of close relatives or self-portraits. In her words, with sculpture anything is possible – it can even be split in two, to reveal the essence of things.  

Petri Hytönen (1963) began the series Colourful Delirium in 2020, when he continued his black-and-white drawing series started in 2017, this time painting them in colour. The title Delirium arose from a personal experience – a severe inflammation, intense pain, and the medication used to relieve it opened a path to his more subconscious drawing impulses. 

In the series, the artist explores the subconscious, pop art, euphoria, and transformation, but above all how a black-and-white work acquires new meaning when colour is added. At the same time, the experience of colouring itself comes to the fore: the juxtaposition of black-and-white with colour, and the observation of colour as a chemically reactive substance on dry or moistened paper. 

Equally important is the enlargement of the drawings into pigment prints at twice their original size. In this new, larger format, the work transforms into something completely different. According to Hytönen, Colourful Delirium also makes it possible to experiment with different modes of presentation – as print, online, and in the exhibition space. 

Sampsa Indrén (1975) presents his drawings, watercolours, and prints. Pessi Rautio, editor-in-chief of the art magazine Taide, has written about his work: "It is easy to appreciate realistic drawing and painting – they show things clearly, without mixing or complicating them. But Sampsa Indrén demonstrates that mere accurate depiction does not resolve matters. There is always something disturbing in his works – sometimes more easily discernible, sometimes harder to define. The perfectly and flawlessly constructed images often seem to carry within them something that we perceive as incomplete. For this reason, they do not quickly fade from memory. Perhaps it happens that after our initial confusion, we begin to perceive a new kind of beauty – a synthesis of contradictory elements. Perhaps we come to understand more deeply the true nature of the world – what good and evil really are."

Jarmo Vellonen (1958) exhibits photographs from his forest project Vanishing Art. Since 2020, he has been creating sculptures on the trunks of living trees using natural clay dug from the forest. For each work, he first seeks out a suitable place and tree. The themes of his sculptures are closely tied to nature, often drawing inspiration from figures of Finnish mythology. 

Vellonen does not use any binding materials in his work – it is important to him that the clay eventually returns to the natural cycle. The durability of the works depends on weather conditions; in winter, clay is replaced by snow and ice. The artist calls his practice process art, with photographic documentation forming an inseparable part of it. To date, he has created more than a hundred figures.