Petri Juntunen

If photography is generally considered the art of light, then Petri Juntunen’s photographs (*1975 in Gothenburg) are the virtuoso counter-thesis to this idea. Because his medium is not lightness, but all-encompassing darkness. His motif is not pictorial genesis, but its deterioration. In his series At the Heart of It All, time-worn objects, overgrown landscapes, wrecks, and ruins peel themselves out of a canvasfilling night in order to simultaneously testify to their own existence and their dissolution. In doing so, the artist renders what he describes as the fundamental existential conflict of life visible and palpable: “How one looks at his own existence, at the same time seeing the beginning and sensing the inevitable end.” It is this human condition to which Juntunen lends photographic expression for the purpose of sharing with us its uncanniness, its elegy, and above all its sublimity.