KARI AAPRO - Paintings
17.8. - 4.9.2011

Press Release

BLACK HORSES USE SCOOTER

The central theme of Kari Aapro´s art is, and has for years been man, an ordinary man in his or her own environment, as a person, good or bad. Beauty, ugliness, poverty, outcast, but also today´s so-called big-money-people and their odd manners give Kari Aapro plenty of stories worth telling in his paintings.

Polished gentlemen -series, Jobs-series

Sometimes news and headlines or even job notices in the newspapers start to tickle Kari Aapro´s socially tuned sense of humour in a very special way. The Polished gentlemen -series were based on a topic of “the big boys” eagerness to use big machines in their knight plays. Also the news of the gentlemen with a hard and competitive attitude concerning important jobs and social status provoked his interest, and the emerging of a black horse to the competition, provoked him even more (reference to Jean Cocteau´s The Orfeus Testament film). As a matter of fact the Today´s Knighthood of The Black Horse gave the title to the whole exhibition.

The Jobs-series is a continuation to Aapro´s earlier themes, because the jobs notices really are an endless source for such as Kari Aapro´s state of humour.

Colour and only colour defines the work

Colour, to Kari Aapro it is oil, is always a challenge. The actual work, painting is happening, improving, considered and defined on the terms of colour. The nearly abstract colour surfaces and the strong strokes give the form to the motif – the looking of the theme is secondary. Maybe Kari Aapro´s taunting humour is seen in the names he gives to his paintings; the name Don Quijote rides again is surely based on a real event.