Heikki Marila: The Aesthetics of Excess and Decay in Contemporary Finnish Painting... A Well-Rounded Critique of His Painting Practices
- Ahmed Kheder
- 24 hours ago
- 6 min read
Heikki Marila (b. 1966) is a prominent Finnish painter whose work navigates the complex terrains of beauty, history, and materiality. Renowned for his large-scale, impasto-rich canvases, Marila's paintings challenge the dichotomy between abstraction and figuration, particularly through his reinterpretations of Baroque floral still lifes and religious iconography. This article explores Marila’s stylistic development, his conceptual engagement with the history of painting, and his material practice. Through a critical analysis of key bodies of work—especially his flower paintings from the early 2010s—this article situates Marila within broader dialogues of postmodern painting, affect theory, and Nordic aesthetics.
An Exploration of Heikki Marila's Painting Oeuvre
Introduction
Heikki Marila emerged in the Finnish art scene during the early 1990s, initially associated with a conceptual approach to painting that often-featured textual elements and subversive imagery. Over the past three decades, his work has evolved into highly expressive, tactile canvases that have earned him both national and international recognition. Best known for his monumental reinterpretations of Baroque flower paintings, Marila’s work operates in tension between seduction and repulsion, representation and abstraction, beauty and decay.
This article examines the evolution of Marila’s painting practice through an art historical and theoretical lens. By analyzing his technique, themes, and visual references, we aim to articulate how Marila navigates the cultural memory of painting while asserting its ongoing relevance in contemporary art.
Historical Context and Influences
The Baroque as Motif and Strategy
Marila's best-known series, Flower Paintings (2010–2012), explicitly reimagines 17th-century Dutch and Flemish still life traditions. However, rather than mere homage, these works offer a critical, visceral engagement with Baroque aesthetics. His florals are monumental (often over 2 meters tall), painted with aggressive, sculptural impasto, and oscillate between figuration and abstraction.
The choice of Baroque still life is significant not only for its formal richness but also for its symbolic complexity. The vanitas tradition, with its meditations on mortality and the transience of beauty, is literalized in Marila’s technique—his flowers appear to be rotting, melting, or violently blooming, collapsing the traditional stillness of still life into an eruptive, almost bodily presence.
Dialogues with Art History
Marila’s engagement with art history extends beyond subject matter into method. His paintings evoke and subvert the canonical history of painting—from Rembrandt and Snyders to Abstract Expressionism and the Viennese Actionists. The gestural, even chaotic, quality of his surfaces nods to postwar abstraction, while the compositional structures maintain historical reference points.
Moreover, Marila’s paintings challenge Clement Greenberg’s modernist paradigm, which advocated for purity and flatness in painting. Instead, he embraces impurity, thickness, and historical citation—characteristics aligned more with postmodern pastiche and the “return to painting” debates of the late 20th century.
Materiality and Process
The Tactile Surface
One of the most immediately striking features of Marila’s paintings is their intense materiality. Layers of oil paint are applied in thick, visceral strokes, often creating a topography of color and texture that rises several centimeters from the canvas. This technique aligns him with artists such as Frank Auerbach or Georg Baselitz, where the material of paint is as important as the image it constructs.
Marila’s use of impasto functions on both visual and symbolic levels. Visually, it destabilizes the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, forcing the viewer to oscillate between recognizing flowers and confronting paint as matter. Symbolically, the excess of paint gestures toward themes of decadence, putrefaction, and collapse—recalling the sensuous and grotesque aspects of Baroque aesthetics.
The Role of Decay
Decay is not merely a metaphor in Marila’s work; it is embedded in the process. Paint is pushed to the point of overindulgence, threatening to obliterate the form beneath. The artist’s palette—while initially appearing lush and vibrant—often includes tones of rot, such as browns, ochres, and ashen greys, giving the impression of decomposing flora.
In this sense, Marila’s paintings embody an aesthetics of entropy. They seduce with scale and color but repel through their overwhelming materiality and affective weight. The flower, a traditional symbol of beauty and ephemerality, is thus turned into an unstable object of contemplation.
Themes and Conceptual Frameworks
Beauty and Violence
Marila’s floral paintings offer a commentary on the dual nature of beauty—both alluring and excessive. The overripe, almost monstrous quality of his flowers evokes the sublime, as theorized by Edmund Burke and later Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject. His work forces the viewer to confront a beauty that is not serene or harmonious but volatile and uncanny.
The Persistence of Painting
In an age dominated by digital media and conceptual art, Marila’s dedication to painting—particularly oil painting—is itself a conceptual stance. His work asserts the vitality of painting as a medium capable of both historical reflection and sensory immediacy. His canvases refuse the flatness of digital images, insisting on the bodily presence of paint and the temporal labor of its application.
Marila’s process, which can take months per painting, emphasizes slowness and accumulation, countering the instantaneous consumption of contemporary visual culture.
Nordic Melancholy and Landscape
While Marila’s subject matter is often drawn from European still life traditions, his sensibility is deeply rooted in Finnish aesthetics. There is a restrained violence in his paintings that resonates with the melancholy and austerity found in Nordic literature and cinema. The decay and darkness in his florals can be read as metaphors for the psychological and environmental conditions of the North.
Reception and Position in Contemporary Art
Marila received the Carnegie Art Award in 2012, one of the most prestigious recognitions in Nordic art, further cementing his reputation beyond Finland. Critics have lauded his work for its visual power, historical complexity, and emotive force. His paintings have been exhibited in major institutions across Europe, including the Helsinki Art Museum and the Malmö Konsthall.
Despite working within a traditional medium, Marila’s practice engages with contemporary concerns: the exhaustion of images, the return to materiality, and the intersections of history and affect. In this way, he stands alongside international painters such as Glenn Brown, Anselm Kiefer, and Cecily Brown, who similarly grapple with the weight of history and the possibilities of painterly excess.
A Well-Rounded Critique of Heikki Marila's Painting Practices
Conceptual Depth
Heikki Marila large-scale, heavily impasto paintings that often reference Baroque floral still life, religious imagery, and historical art motifs. His work challenges traditional aesthetics through a nihilistic chaotic use of paint. The resultant artwork is a bold interplay between historical subject matter and chaotic abstraction. Marila is trying to transform what was once a symbol of beauty and religious order into a site of formal chaotic nihilistic violence.
In his reinterpretation of religious and historical themes, Marila continues this critical dialogue with the past and religion. Challenging the boundaries of religious and historical themes with chaotic expressive painting practices, he presents these subjects as fragmented and abstracted, stripping them of their traditional iconographic clarity while amplifying their fuzziness and oppressive nature.
Through an aggressive manipulation of paint, a critical reimagining of Baroque iconography, and a thematic engagement with mortality and decay, Marila is trying to create works that are at once beautiful and disturbing. His practice challenges the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, past and present, surface and depth. In doing so, Marila is aiming to assert himself as a critical voice in the ongoing dialogue between history and modernity in contemporary art.
Visual Impact
Marila often applies paint with palette knives, brushes, and even his hands, layering pigment in chaotic or semi-controlled painting practices that oscillate between figuration and abstraction creating a texture full of spontaneity and expression but to the border line of chaos.
Marila's techniques somehow are trying to evoke a sense of decay or corruption that undercuts the aesthetic, religious, and historical subjects he often references. The result is a tension between the lush, sensual history of aesthetic painting and a contemporary sense of entropy and material collapse.
The idea of embedding chaos in painting practices began with the nihilistic movement of Abstract Expressionism, pioneered by artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. However, what was once shocking in the post–World War II era has since become familiar to the average art viewer. By the late decades of the 20th century, the visual impact of chaotic painting practices had diminished. Without the element of shock, Marila's chaotic techniques no longer held the same emotional power over viewers.
Knowing that controlled light transitions are an essential emotional tool for engaging viewers, Marila's destructive tendencies lack any deep handling of light. His paintings are intentionally flattened, thereby abandoning a crucial element in the process of visually pleasing the viewer.
Also, the color palette in Marila's painting practice is often faded and anemic—almost stagnant, tube-like pigments—lacking any evident effort to discover expressive hues that align with his decaying, nihilistic, and destructive theoretical intentions.
In conclusion, Marila's paintings with their chaotic impasto techniques, poor handling of light and shadow, stagnant color palette, and familiar compositions lost the minimal visual impact required to deliver his conceptual messages to his viewers hearts.
Conclusion
Heikki Marila’s paintings occupy a unique space within contemporary art, merging historical reference with painterly experimentation. Through his monumental and materially dense canvases, Marila challenges viewers to confront the beauty and horror embedded in visual culture, the history of art, and the very material of paint. His work affirms that painting, far from being obsolete, remains a vital mode of engaging with the world—capable of containing contradiction, sensation, and thought.
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