Jarkko Peltonen

Jarkko Peltonen, the artist, was born in Turku, Finland, 1947. He has been working as a free artist since 1983 and has had several personal exhibitions in Finland and abroad, e.g., in France, Germany,Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Russia, USA and Spain.

As an artist Jarkko Peltonen is very versatile. In addition to oil paintings his production consists of bronze sculptures, plaster casts, silver and gold jewellery, ex libris, illustrations and lithographies, not to forget tha drawings made a few lines capturing the essentials of the persons and the situation.

The task of art is to awaken.

Art is selection and clarification, while life can be all kinds of taking, grabbing and chaos. Jarkko Peltonen shows us things from the perspective of life itself, assuming a position on what it is to be a human being today in a way which cannot leave one without feeling. There’s no need to explain why there are clowns in these paintings—what else at the end of the day do we see around us? Or within ourselves? Author Jorge Luis Borgeson put it into words quite successfully when he said: "in the evening, while standing in front of the mirror, you may occasionally see a face which looks at you from somewhere deep. So it should be with art as well: it should show us our deepest visage—just as that mirror does.”

Jarkko Peltonen’s art is a good mirror with its cats, kings, dancers and musicians. It does not display caricatures nor the distorted faces of funhouse mirrors, rather leaving space for our deepest selves and reflection on the same. The image is refined and distanced enough to refract into precisely what it is aiming for: how many roles in the final analysis do we actually have—how many masks do we carry along with us? Jarkko Peltonen’s art is like a thought expressed by an emotion: a common truth which a single lie brings forth.