Mika Hannula: There is a work in the exhibition called Elämäni ohikiitävä rakkaus: Justin Bieber skeittaa Gleisdreieckin puistossa. What is the background to this painting and its history?


Janne Räisänen: The start of the painting situation itself dates back about three years. It was originally intended to be part of the Pitkähiuksista painting series. Then the painting situation somehow overran and I got frustrated. I cut out part of the painting. Then I slashed it a bit. Then this was left over. Then, as time went on, I painted new layers on it, over and over again. When I then moved to Schöneberg last summer, I restarted the work once more. And that figure appeared in it, which, later again, I called Justin Bieber.


MH: Is the situation and the event described by the work’s title true, a fairy tale or something even grander, more earth-shattering?


JR: Originally, there was no connection between the painting itself and the title. Then, one sunny September day, Justin Bieber visited Berlin, i.e. a couple of months ago. When I opened up Internet links about it, I realized that Bieber was right next door, skateboarding in the Park am Gleisdreieck. A photographer had taken a picture of it. The idea began to bother me so much that I thought of adding something to the Elämäni ohikiitävä rakkaus painting series, which began three or four years ago. The painting itself already existed. At that stage, it still had no name, and that title somehow fitted that work best.


MH: Is Justin Bieber good, then? And if yes, then good at what? JR: He’s no good at all.


MH: How long are these series, in volume and chronologically, say, for example, Elämäni ohikiitävä rakkaus?


JR: These series have only started to come up while I have been living in Berlin. Before that, not at all. My photographer friend Mika Minetti, who also lives in Berlin, and I have developed them every now and then. So, chronologically, since 2011 up to the present. Elämäni ohikiitävä rakkaus: Wolfgang Tillmans was most probably the first. Since then, for example, Jesus and a reindeer have been on adventures in the series. Separately, not together. I always think, now the series is done, but then I notice another one has come along.


MH: Painting on canvas and drawing on paper. Both are important, key methods, for you. Looking at your working process, which comes first, or do they overlap? And how are these different working methods related?


JR: Yes, drawing always comes first. First thing in the morning with my porridge, or even before then. I try to keep it as a daily routine. It is a big part of my self-discipline – otherwise, I don’t necessarily get started working at all, since I work in the same place as I live. I draw for an hour, then I eat something small. I go to the computer. I look at something, it could be anything, for example, the news on TV. Then I go back and look at my old works. To see if anything could still be done to them. If not, then I pick up the sketchpad again. I don’t really know if there is any great significance to this arrangement in itself. As long as I can just work up some daily energy. The music I choose on each occasion also plays a part here.


I want the drawing to give my work a continual routine and continuity. I want the same immediate atmosphere in my paintings as in drawings. I see a painting and a drawing as the same thing. They sort of go hand in hand the whole time.


MH: In one discussion, at a public occasion, you were asked when you knew that you would be an artist. You told about seeing a Kalervo Palsa exhibition when you were in upper secondary school. This motivated you and gave you a push at that time. What does Palsa mean to you now?


JR: Palsa was the start. I still think of him every now and then. He is perhaps more of a kind of “figure” or role model from bygone days. A legend who lives on in my head.


MH: What about today’s significant “figures”? Who are they, in painting and in general?


JR: They come and go. For quite a long time, Wolfgang Tillmans was very much that sort of figure. And [Finnish pop singer] Kikka. It’s hard to name figures like that in painting now. Well, let’s say, for instance, Leena Luostarinen. I just visited Carol Rama’s tremendous exhibition at EMMA. She could be that sort of figure, too.


MH: So, what the above-mentioned Tillmans, Palsa and Rama have in common is that they were and are in many senses outsiders, from a certain marginal area of society...


JR: ...Yes, and it is specifically this status of outsider that interests me in all of them – albeit each one in different ways. Rama was new to me, but she left a powerful impression in my mind. The fascinating thing about her is the roughness of the painting. Her works do not seem at all calculated. Some of them were quite heavy-going, to the point of verging on being tales of illnesses. Of course, behind all this is the term and genre often associated with me, art brut, although I personally don’t see myself as being close to that type of thing.


And if we think of Tillmans, what has attracted me there is not so much the individual pieces, but the way he constructs whole exhibitions. They have influenced how I myself have done installations.


MH: Let’s put another work under the ‘microscope’. This again has a highly intriguing and surely fitting title. This is a painting titled Maailman vahvin poliisinalle. There is a police officer in there, along with a figure that is perhaps more reminiscent of a hippopotamus. The background and genesis of the work, what’s involved here?


JR: This work is an exception in the sense that I have used a quite special and unusual ground. It is not cotton canvas, but polyester, i.e. a totally artificial material. The painting ground was exaggeratedly white, sort of the white of death and cold. It sucks in paint in quite a different way from a cotton ground canvas. If in cotton the paint stops a little as if halfway, in polyester it goes through rapidly and you can see it on the other side. At the same time, the shades of the paints are softened and this gives the canvas a sort of batik feeling.


MH: Which was which – i.e. which came first: the animal or the human being?


JR: In this case the hippopotamus-like figure definitely came first. At one point, I rolled the work up, because it was stuck, and went back to it later. I carried it on by colouring in the lower section of the hippo, and from there quite by chance the police officer came in. In the end, I put in another police officer alongside it, as if as a companion and friend, to guide and help the first police officer.


MH: Let’s get to the title of the exhibition. It is impossible, totally impossible not to ask: What does it mean? Where does it come from? Is it a wish, an encouragement or an order? Or all three at once?


JR: The title originally comes from the Kikka album Ota vaatteet pois (which translates Take Your Clothes Off). I was sitting in the park with Minetti one day, drinking wine, and I told him about this idea. He was delighted, and said, what if you add “Käy peremmälle” (which translates “Step inside”). This somehow sounded so good and prompted such uproarious laughter that I wrote the title down on paper and accepted it. I no longer wanted to think about any other alternative titles. And since this is, after all, an exhibition [in Helsinki] in January, then I think taking some clothes off is automatic.


MH: Have you arranged openings before in which there have been clothes or they have been taken off, either from you or the public?


JR: The title doesn’t refer specifically to stripping off, but to love and romance. First there was A Secret Entrance to an Enchanted Garden – There Is Still Hope at Anhava (August 2012). Then in Berlin at the Musterzimmer exhibition Oletko ikuisesti minun?, where on a hot summer’s day in 2013 I received people in bed wearing a kimono. There was an old-fashioned bed in the middle of the first room, as an organic part of the exhibition. This is now the third part of the theme of love, in which it is time to take your clothes off.