Communication with the purpose of culturally promoting artists included in the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Collection, works protected by intellectual property rights. Their total or partial reproduction or processing by any means, or their transmission or cession in any form is forbidden without the authorisation of the holder of the rights to the works
Self portrait, White Sands, New Mexico
TECHNICAL DATA
Author: Arno Rafael Minkkinen (Helsinki, 1945)
Title: Self portrait, White Sands, New Mexico
Year: 2000
Technique: digital printing with silver gelatin on aluminium
Size: 104 x 137 cm
Edition: 2/10
One of the latest acquisitions of the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation for its contemporary art collection is this photograph by Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen, acquired during his exhibition in Paris in autumn 2014. It is an excellent example of his most outstanding works, where the artist usually uses the body as a landscape immersed in the vastness of nature. These known series, set in different parts of the world and catalogued in books, such as that entitled “Body Land”, are a collection of self-portraits where the artist positions his own naked body in isolated places, designing the scenery and symbolically playing with the figure’s contours and silence, in black and white.
In the work by Minkkinen, the character of physical challenge that the author establishes in the preparatory study highlights the compositional perfection, playing careful attention to detail, perspective and natural light. The naked body before an equally stark landscape, devoid of any story, recreates impossible and poetic shapes that are full of suggestions. His projects respond to a thorough exploration of the photographic technique and process, with interesting morphological, methodological and conceptual solutions which he describes in his creative postulates, fully described on his website and on the philosopher’s stone of each of his thematic series. Bearing in mind that “what happens in our mind, happens inside the camera”, Minkkinen analyses, over and over, the intrinsic relationships of interior and exterior landscape, the basic relationships between light and shadow, to configure these fragments of body and nature where nothing is what it seems, but lies beneath an almost neo-Platonic spirituality, an ideal of mutual communion that never fails to surprise.