Tommi Pasanen
Puitteet
Puitteet (Settings) explores wood, canvas, and paint as the materials that make painting possible. In the tradition of painting, these three materials have typically been understood in a particular relationship to one another: paint creates the image, canvas serves as its surface, and wood functions as a supporting structure or decorative element.
In the works presented in the exhibition, canvas and wood are brought alongside paint as equally significant visual elements. The combination of weathered wood and fresh oil paint heightens our awareness of the distinctive qualities of the materials. The pictorial surfaces are constructed through unexpected interruptions and subtle transitions from one texture and form to another.
Construction is present both as a painting practice and as a subject matter. The works emerge from the built environment and its often-overlooked details. The subjects of the paintings return to their materials, forming an environment of their own.
Tommi Pasanen (b. 1995, Oulu) is a painter living and working in Helsinki. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2024. Pasanen’s works have been exhibited at venues including Kunsthalle Helsinki, the Aine Art Museum, the Oulu Museum of Art, and various galleries. His works have been acquired by the State Art Commission, the Aine Art Museum, the Finnish Art Society, and numerous private collections. Puitteet is his first solo exhibition.
The exhibition has been supported by the Arts and Culture Agency, the Finnish Art Society, the Paulo Foundation, and the Greta and William Lehtinen Foundation.
Linda Roschier
Passage
Painting as a Passage
Yes, the particles of the world can be connected in ways that defy my reasoning.
The duduk plays a long note
I eat a pointed pepper at my desk, leaving behind its stem, filled with pale, flat, round seeds. Where is the beautiful plant that grew such a fine fruit?
Far away, far away.
The nutrients of the pepper rush into my bloodstream and give me the strength to paint.
The shape of the seeds spins from the brush onto the canvas, intertwining with different motifs from my surroundings.
On the threshold of sleep, I find myself looking at red-and-black images.
Passage is an exhibition inspired by the cave-like character of Forum Box’s Parvi space. The installation consists of oil paintings and contemporary portable cave paintings — plaster works, or Portables.
Linda Roschier (b. 1979) is a Helsinki-based painter working within the expanded field of painting. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2020 and her Master of Arts degree from the University of Art and Design Helsinki in 2009.
For Roschier, painting functions as a passage between self and other, the visible and the invisible, the present and the timeless. In recent years, her practice has increasingly focused on the ability of plant seeds to shape landscapes, and on their parallel with painting as a fragile yet powerful object that carries time.
Like souls, objects and materials also seem to have their own routes from the invisible into the visible.
Roschier has held solo exhibitions in Finland and abroad. Her most recent solo exhibitions include DAWN at the Gallery of the Finnish Painters’ Union in Helsinki in 2023, Secrets at Gallery Snow in Berlin in 2023, and Bardo at Gallery Huuto in Helsinki in 2020. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions including Modern Love at Helsinki Contemporary (2021), Tähtiä ja madonreikiä at HAA Gallery (2025), at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, and Reliefs for Animals at Galleri Rostrum in Malmö (2024). Roschier’s works are held in the collections of the Finnish State Art Commission, Poikilo Museums, the Finnish Art Society, and private collections. In 2025, the Helsinki Saskiat awarded her a recognition grant.
The completion of the exhibition has been supported by the Uusimaa Regional Fund of the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Painting as a point on the road where past, present and future meet
Linda Roschier’s exhibition Passage is situated in the cavelike Parvi space at Forum Box. A series of paintings and small sculptures are on display in the space. Rather than positioning the viewer as a distant observer, the exhibition invites them to walk along a path opened by the artworks. The paintings interact with another; in their dialogue, mutual references and recurring themes can be found.
The circular form that appears repeatedly in the large paintings of the exhibition is inspired by a bell pepper seed. The hidden intelligence of plants is a topic that fascinates the artist. According to Roschier, seeds have an ability to paint the landscape of the future, and as such “they’re quite the painters”. The circle can also be seen as a closed form, enclosing an entire world, or a tiny detail. The spherical forms placed on the painting surface side by side are fragments of what has been seen and experienced. The recurrence of the motifs gives the exhibition a dreamlike, nonlinear narration and cyclicality. The paintings with circles can be likened to dreams: much like in a dream, different temporal and spatial registers can be simultaneously present in them, allowing for a presence in multiple places and situations at the same time.
One of Roschier’s long-time interests is seeing, and in the Passage exhibition she continues exploring this topic. One of the recurring themes of the exhibition is the evolution of looking and seeing, and the part that the artwork plays in it. Roschier focuses on the dominant role of the mobile phone in contemporary visual culture, but ultimately, the question of the evolution of seeing is more universal to her. Given that even primitive cyanobacteria react to light, the thought of seeing as an ability that only belongs to the (human) animal is called into question.
As an artist, Roschier engages with different temporalities. She looks around her in the present moment, but also into the past and into a speculative future – a time where the material foundations known to us today may have become fragile. She believes that a post-mobile phone era is yet to come. What will we hold in our hands and carry around with us in the time after mobile phones? What will a painting be if wood and canvas are no longer available?
-Inkeri Suutari
This text is based on conversations between the writer and Linda Roschier that took place at Roschier’s studio in Arabia, near the Annala community garden plots, while the artist was preparing for the Passage exhibition.
Hemmo Siponen
Benthoscapes
The obvious is sinking towards invisibility. It floats down as flakes ever deeper, as a myriad fall of snow, covering the beneath, as an overlay on the bottom, as a shape-leveling coat. The obvious accumulates, becoming heavier, enveloping within itself all that slumps to the bed repeatedly being made.
Snow falls underwater to the bottom of the sea. The snow is what remains of an algal bloom of the one summer back, which tinted the surface waters to a more greenish turquoise than they were during that spring.
Distracted by pursuit and flight, two cephalopods swim to a deep zone devoid of oxygen. Almost weightless, they sink to the bottom, and are becoming gently covered by snow. Ink sacks become encapsulated, then slowly pressed flat as black prints inside the compressing chalk, as an abyssal fresco.
In the watercolour paintings of Hemmo Siponen at his exhibition Benthoscapes at Forum Box, colour is attached to a calcareous primer. As before. Meanwhile elsewhere, of all that has hit an invisible floor, some formations of colours have a chance to set enclosed in silently lithifying layers of drifts.
Hemmo Siponen (b.1991) is a visual artist from Helsinki. He graduated as a Master of Fine Art from Academy of Fine Arts Uniarts Helsinki in 2019. His main working method is watercolour painting. Most recently Siponen has exhibited works at K17 space for art and ecology in Nikkilä in December 2025. Previously he has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Pleiku, Berlin (2025), and in Helsinki at tm-gallery (2023), Gallery Sinne (2021) and HAM-gallery (2020). In 2022 his works were exhibited in a group exhibition at Schwarz Contemporary in Berlin.
During the year 2026 Siponen’s work at his studio in Helsinki and in artist residencies at Vadso in Norway and at Mazzano Romano in Italy has been kindly supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Finnmark Fylkeskommune and Väinö Tanner Foundation.
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