Back to Archive
Pasi Rauhala
December, 2012
Pasi Rauhala’s Moments presents paused situations from a world both quite familiar and very bizarre. Each individual work seamlessly mixes reality with fantasy – while playing delightfully disorienting games with our sense of scale. Rauhala places his miniature figures in absurd situations related in one way or another to the worries of everyday life; everything is damn hard, but when observed from a distance, also hilarious.
Rauhala states:
“I work in cycles. I constantly collect suitable objects and when I have enough variety I sit down, spread my things out – and play! This stage of the work takes a week or two, after which my pockets are quite empty. The original idea of this work was to create a visual diary of my life’s turning points and important events”.
Initially, Rauhala strictly adhered to this autobiographically line, yet gradually other inspirations – from movies, books and other artists – began to inform the narratives. This expanded spectrum seemed to naturally include a range of themes based on puns and humorous misunderstandings. A consistent key to Rauhala’s world of comedy and darkness is how the text and objects complement each other in ways that both deliver spot-on punch lines yet also sometimes deepen ambiguities.