Santeri Tuori: Black Trees

Santeri Tuori’s forthcoming solo exhibition at Purdy Hicks Gallery will present new works from his Forest and Sky series, together with two new groups of work, Black Trees, centred on London’s iconic plane trees and small-scale cloud studies, Cloud.

For the Forest series Tuori has spent much time on the remote island of Kökar in the Aland archipelago in southwestern Finland. He photographs repeatedly the same place, from the identical spot, at different seasons and times of day, sometimes years apart. Multiple images, both black and white and colour, are then superimposed. The series, like all his work, reveal his preoccupation with the passage of time. 

Santeri Tuori's Sky series focusses solely on the sky as a subject in its own right. Again, the artist layers black and white and colour photographs, giving some more prominence while others are only nebulously suggested, resulting in images that seems as if on the border of painting and photography, allowing the viewer total immersion in skyscapes of great depth and luminosity. In the new small-scale series, Cloud, Tuori has photographed a single cloud moving across the sky, taking numerous shots over a short period of time. The ephemeral nature of the moment shimmers in the work, the light fades into immateriality, slips into blackness, and flashes into its opposite. The Clouds are displayed individually in drifting clusters, creating the impression that the images are dissolving into the sky. 

Building on his distinctive layering technique, Tuori’s series entitled Black Trees, created during his recent residency with the Backroom Foundation in London, are made with two identical images – one printed on photographic paper and the other on delicate translucent Japanese paper. The loosely attached layers create a depth and dimensionality, conjuring with their performative quality the true grandeur of London planes with their majestic trunks and gestural branches. Appreciated for their resilience to urban conditions and pollution, London planes are a celebrated part of the city’s landscape.