Felipe de Ávila Franco
Carbon Derrocacy
Carbon Derrocacy is a solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Felipe de Ávila Franco that examines the persistent influence of fossil-based systems on contemporary life. Through sculpture, installation, and moving image, the exhibition explores how processes of extraction continue to shape not only global infrastructures and geopolitical dynamics, but also perception itself.
Working with industrial materials, algorithmic images, and constructed environments, Franco traces the extended chains that connect natural resources to technological systems. Rather than presenting extraction as a distant phenomenon, the exhibition reveals its ongoing presence within the material and visual conditions of the present.
The central installation, Vessels Barricade, consists of forty-eight industrial oil barrels arranged into a cubic formation. The structure evokes both global circulation and containment, while its surface, marked by simulated bullet impacts, reflects a condition of continuous geopolitical tension. The work suggests a form of conflict that operates not only through direct violence, but through
anticipation, mediation, and the production of uncertainty.
In Cold Bodies, emergency thermal blankets serve as reflective surfaces for UV-printed, AI-generated images of minerals such as coal and rare earth elements. The work highlights the industrial chains that link fossil fuel refinement to the extraction of metals essential for digital infrastructures, including data centers and computational systems. By doing so, it reveals the
material dependencies behind technologies often perceived as immaterial.
The video installation Leaks presents a synthetic visualization in which oil and seawater merge into a single substance. This impossible scenario reflects on the forced coexistence of incompatible systems, such as ecological preservation and extractive economies, pointing to the fragile and unstable conditions that define the present.
Felipe de Ávila Franco’s practice engages with questions of materiality, energy, and environmental aesthetics. Working between South America and Europe, his research focuses on the intersections between industrial processes, technological systems, and their socio-political implications. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in major collections such as the Museum of Brazilian Art FAAP in São Paulo, the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma.
The realization of this exhibition was supported by Suomen KulttuuriRahasto and the Arts
Promotion Centre Finland TAIKE. Special thanks for the collaboration and support of Paketo Oy.
Felipe de Ávila Franco (b.1982) is a Brazilian visual artist working between South America and Europe since 2013. His work
explores the intersection of sculpture and other mediums, delving into themes of biopolitics and environmental aesthetics.
Through different blends of traditional and experimental techniques, his process incorporates industrial materials and residues
to be transfigured into sculptures, installations, ceramic series and other interventions questioning notions of nature, energy,
territory, and the human body.
Grounded on concepts of materiality, his work expresses concern with the industrial dystopia of our current times, illuminating
sculpture as a practice capable of materializing temporalities and dimensions that reflect on the encounter between the scales
of the human, the nonhuman, and the planet. The artist addresses the artistic process as a mechanism to awaken new
perspectives of knowledge, establishing interdisciplinary links between arts, humanities, natural sciences and ancient
cosmologies. Engaging in a critical examination of topics regarding the socio-environmental emergency, his work aims at
evoking art as a tool to activate a deeper discussion on the conflicting relationship between human society and the natural
environment, highlighting those as interdependent entities.
Currently, the artist works between Brazil and Finland. His work has been displayed in South America, Asia, Europe and United
States, and integrates distinguished collections such as the Museum of Brazilian Arts FAAP, in São Paulo, the Helsinki Arts
Museum HAM, and the Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA, in Helsinki.
Mika Hytti
Khora
Becoming in Being.
In the spring of 2002, Mika and I sat on the terrace of the Hȏtel Chevillon artist residency in France and exchanged thoughts about life and art. According to Mika, art always condensed into three things: love, death, and loneliness.
Now, twenty-five years later, as I look at Mika’s new paintings, I wonder whether they speak of love, death, and loneliness. Perhaps—but not directly, rather in a mysterious way.
As if love were only just becoming love. As if death were only just becoming death. As if loneliness were only just becoming loneliness.
According to Aristotle, reality can be described with two words. Energeia describes how things are, and dynamis describes how things will come to be. Dynamis is thus potential; a tree already exists in the seed, even though it is not yet concretely there.
In the Buddhist tradition, it is said that form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. By form is meant everything we see and that seems enduring. Emptiness, in turn, means that everything is impermanent, indivisible, and constantly changing.
Emptiness manifests in time as form, which ultimately dissolves back into emptiness; everything flows in space-time. One form may last a second in the world, another thousands of years—yet one day it will disappear.
In Mika’s paintings, something is constantly coming into being. As if we were in khora, an in-between state, a place of emergence that cannot be defined. The surface of the canvas is a boundary where the world dreams itself; from the unknown, something is even now becoming. For the time being, it may be only color.
Joel Haahtela, writer
Mika Hytti (b.1961) graduated as a painter from Art School Maa in 1990, and also completed studies in art education at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki in 1997. During his thirty-year career, he has had several solo exhibitions, participated in many group exhibitions and taught at several art schools since the 1990s. His works are in the collections of Kouvola Art Museum, the State of Finland and HUS, as well as in many private collections. Hytti is a member of Forum Box, the Helsinki Artists’ Association and the Finnish Painters’ Union.
Laura Lowe
FIAT LUX
FIAT LUX presents Laura Lowe’s latest Structural Colour Paintings, based on observations of melting ice made with polarised light microscopy during the Ars Bioarctica residency at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station. Polarisation reveals colour spectra in the ice crystals, allowing the otherwise invisible structures and their change to be seen. The works exhibited mimic the transparencies, reflectivities and structural colours formed within melting ice. The series continues the artist’s earlier investigations into the colour of oil slicks and coal.
Lowe’s process is near alchemical in nature: the immaterial-seeming colours of her paintings emerge like in a prism, as light refracts through translucent layers of paint. She chemically manipulates different paints, embedding her layers with reflective or crystal-forming materials such as salts, shiny pigments, glass and metal powders.
Her practice merges the traditional layering technique of the Old Master painting with an attempt to understand colour from a scientific perspective. Light and colour have fascinated artists since the time of cave painting. In Lowe’s work, however, this interest in the dialogue between light and surface has deepened from a technical enquiry into the thematic core of the work: how energy transforms inanimate matter into something living. All life on Earth originates from this intertwining of sunlight and matter. The event of Lowe’s paintings is, above all, an encounter between the immaterial and the material —spirit and body— the process through which life comes into being.
Lowe’s paintings undergo this metamorphosis in a way that the viewer can observe almost as if it were a scientific experiment. They challenge the traditional notion of paintings as ‘nature morte’ a still or lifeless moment. Colour appears and disappears as the viewer moves past, shifting with light, shadow and reflection. The seemingly liquid mirror-polished surface immerse the viewer into this kaleidoscopic landscape, alluding to our participation in the cycle of life and death.
The exhibition is accompanied by an introductory essay written by art critic Sanna Lipponen.
Laura Lowe (s.1991 Vantaa) is an emerging oil painter working with the iridescent colour spectra found in oil slicks and coal seams. Rather than using pigment, Lowe’s Structural Colour Paintings produce colour by building up layers of translucent paint, which bend and refract light like a prism. Her practice is informed by laboratory experimentation and an alchemical interest in the interplay of light and matter.
Lowe trained at Factum Arte & Factum Foundation, Madrid before completing her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki, during which she won the Hotel GLO Art competition and her MFA degree show was awarded the Anita Snellman award. Lowe’s work has been exhibited at Galleria Paperihuone, Hämeenlinna ‘22; Galleria Rajatila, Tampere ‘23; B-galleria, Turku ‘24, and Huuto galleria, Helsinki ‘25. Lowe is currently working with a two-year working grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation on an upcoming solo show “Fiat Lux”, Forum Box ‘26, as well as group shows for Madrid and Oulu.
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