Interaction

We are pleased to announce a new chapter at Ora-Ora, with a show by Finnish artist Juri Markkula at our new space at Soho 189. This show celebrates the hybrid of the digital world with the physical world through an elaborated representation of natural beauty.

Juri Markkula is an artist who makes the industrial and the technological beautiful, turning chemicals into art. Often getting up in the middle of the night to tend to machines that fire his projects, he is an artist who brings an obsessional detail-orientation, producing lovingly rendered abstract surfaces which call to mind objects of a hyper-natural essence.

The intensity of his work in relief, where painted surfaces project forward at us from multiple angles, can be overwhelming. Works such as Carmin Ground from his RGB Ground series, the art pieces appear in different sizes, and call to mind leaves and grass in a magnified, brittle state which serves to create an altered sense of what is natural, what is real.

Markkula applies his unique creative process, which includes a 360 high-resolution scanning system and a custom built digital sculpting system, to celebrate the pure beauty of the ground he sees every day in the rural area of Sweden where he resides. His RGB series is an elaborated representation of nature, with the forms synthetically bolder and digitally amplified.

RGB (Red Green Blue) refers to the additive colour system that is used in every digital screen and video equipment. Markkula purposely chooses these three vibrant artificial colours to create his abstracted beauty. His artworks become this hybrid of the digital world with the physical world.

As Markkula explained: “Well it’s about how I think RGB series work. They seem to be enlightened like a screen. To me, the colour is the surface, the interface to connect with spectators and induce emotions.”