Painting differs from other modes of imaging, among other things, in the way that a painting, apart from its subject matter of motif, also concretely shows the working process that led to the finished work. Painting documents the dialogue between the artist and the work, that journey whose destination is frequently the resolution of the problem chosen as its point of departure. The working process is more or less a detailed account of how that journey went.

The problem that Sami Lukkarinen has set himself is how to take the digitally produced sketch that provides the starting point for his work and realise it in an independent, autonomous painting. A typical Lukkarinen work consists of hundreds of coloured squares, each of which is individual and painted with a broad brush. The visual tension in the work partly arises out of the opposition between the grid pattern that is the backbone of the composition and the colour fields that apparently find themselves in disarray. One of the questions posed by Lukkarinen’s painting is: Why these specific colours? Why this specific order?

Lukkarinen uses architecture photographs as a point of departure for his paintings. When selecting images he nevertheless keeps his hands of the classics of architecture or official portraits of buildings. For him, these are too finished; either they are laden with meanings or then they interpret the buildings. He has picked the photographs of Finnish churches that he uses in his latest paintings series from parish websites. He is fascinated both by the ‘local university’ of the form language of modernist suburban architecture and by the neutral anonymity of the photographs that portray it.

Having found a photograph that will potentially work as a painting, Lukkarinen digitises it and manipulates it by enlarging the pixels to such a size that they enter into a natural, uncomplicated relationship, on the one hand, with their motif and, on the other hand, with the painting as a whole. Each square gets its colour and light value as averages calculated on a computer.

Lukkarinen’s paintings, frequently made up of fields of broken colour, represent a kind of reverse pointillism, in which rather than being broken down into their constituent parts, the colours are mixed together. The painting emerges as he copies his digital photograph a bit at a time onto canvas. Even though he performs his task as well as he can, his objective is, nevertheless, not a hand-made enlargement of the digital sketch, but a work in which the starting point and end result are present in equal measure. This is a painting, a picture of a picture, but it is also an autonomous object, an icon that has come about as the outcome of a multi-stage working process.

Lukkarinen’s relationship with the modernist architecture that is the starting point for his paintings seems complicated, simultaneously desiring and rejecting, admiring and mocking. The gridded colour fields can easily be seen as having a close affinity with the genre of constructivist paintings, which were being made in the mid-20th century, at the same time as these light, rectangular buildings were being completed. Lukkarinen’s works follow their original models, if they have one, but in figurative form, and devoid of the social utopias that were their hallmark, or at most longing for them. They are signs that allude to a lost future and a lost innocence. The idealisation of digital images in turn brings our thoughs back to the present moment. We mostly see this relatively new method of image manipulation when something being published in the media is to be protected or censored. The most common examples are associated with hard porn and with the accused in criminal cases. In some cases modern architecture, too, has been the one in the dock, albeit without the protective rectangle.

A multiplicity of interpretations is a part of Lukkarinen’s art and lifts his works above their individual themes or, for example, above being no more than their relationship with modernism. In fact, specifically the way that his works permit simultaneous and even totally contradictory interpretations speaks of their strengths and ways of surviving in the complicated reality of our age, in which one truth is soon rapidly replaced by another, with both quickly losing their news value.

And yet, just like the architect who has designed his building, Lukkarinen has to paint each work to the point of completion, so as to at least see what it will be like and how it will work. The coloured squares that are the building blocks of the paintings are comparable to the modularity of the buildings that have provided their starting point. The architecture of the image mirrors the image of the architecture, in being conscious of this world.