HENNA VAINIO: OPPOSITE KNOTS
Casemore Gallery, San Francisco
Eugène Ionesco’s play, The Bald Soprano (1950), with its chattering English couples, the Smiths and the Martins conversing in nonsensical non-sequiturs, is a classic of absurdist drama. It was inspired by the playwright’s efforts to learn English with a bilingual French/English language book, English Without Pain (incidentally, Ionesco’s original title) full of instructive banal sentences that,, transposed into dramatic dialogue ,sound insane, like parrots’ monologues. The play ends with the repetition of its opening lines spoken by the Smiths, now repeated, in the Smiths’ home, by the Martins. The arbitrary nature of language and culture—or convention—has been the target of jokes in art before: Magritte’s primer paintings, which label generically rendered images that one might find a a child’s dictionary, with the wrong name, stand out: the image of a horse, for example, is labeled, instructively, la valise. Even rough-edged blotches of paint take on names in theseTeach-Yourself-Wittgensteinese language-and-being paradoxes.
The Finnish sculptor Henna Vainio, in her first solo exhibit at Casemore Gallery, might claim aesthetic kinship with Ionesco, as a fellow student of the complexities and contradictions of hybrid, polyglot English—although it should be noted that she attended art school in London, and her other work marshals other materials in a deconstruction of portraiture and figure sculpture. Here, n “Opposite Knots,” a group of eleven tinted and glazed ceramic sculptures, all from 2025, she spells out specific words that have caught her attention, transforming them into linear tangles, like unfurled typewriter ribbons. The pieces fall into two groups: six airy “Opposite Knots” wall pieces, three large and three small, composed of a few layers of words aligned in different orientations; and four densely packed pedestal sculptures, suggesting industrial or architectural constructions in geometric forms,
Knots hold things together, and Vainio’s opposite knots are flattened arrays of superimposed words that are barely legible, though they make for wonderful linear abstractions in the Brice Marden mold .“Opposite Knots (Stop)” repeats its peremptory command, which we associate with LED traffic signage, in looping letters, with the clay possibly extruded and slip-joined, that suggest willow branches or other woodfcrafts, the archaic visual sspect contradicting the urgency of its automated message. “No Net (peach)” and “No Net (blue)” simulate open-form weavings, in vertical and horizontal formats, respectively, replete with the catenary droop of hanging yarn or rope, repeating—persevarating—the single word ‘no.’ No exit, no escape; everything not mandatory is forbidden. The three smaller “Opposite Knots” pieces, each sixteen inches square, pair linguistic opposites, held together as if by magnetic polarities: ‘the you’ ln “Opposite Knots (You)” iinks with ‘me; ‘“Give)’ with ‘take; “Yes:” with ‘no.’; and (More)” with ‘less. What better metaphors for our current overly complicated culture of contradiction and flooded zone?
Four pedestal-sized sculptures, all under two feet square, are dense. compact, hedge-like arrays of words in the geometric forms of square or cube, rectangular prism (extended cube) and octahedron (pyramid)—skeletonized down to their wintry semiotic bare branches. ”Doubt Janus” is a vertical layer of letters, like a billboard scaffolding, the opposite faces of which say ‘yes,’ referring to the two-faced Roman god of doorways and transitions, Janus (hence, January), looking forward and backward, and perhaps, for modern neurotics, the god of second thoughts and over-thinking. The interlocked letters of the cubic (but off-kilter) “Win” suggest strength in unity, but also, carried to extremes, paralysis and stasis, while the impenetrable verbal thicket of “Tender Change” suggests that money—legal tender—is both a magical protean substance capable of assuming any form, and a potential trap. Finally, “Anti-Age,” with its pyramidal form suggesting both campfires and the crushing monuments of pharaohs, suggests that the anti-aging properties of modern cosmetics and surgery have limited power against the flow of time and life’s oxidations.—if we choose to read subtextual moralizing lessons into these witty contemporary artifacts.