Kalervo Palsa
Kalervo Palsa (March 12, 1947 - October 3, 1987), or Kalle was a Finnish artist in a style that has been described as fantastic realism.
Long neglected, Kalervo Palsa has enjoyed a revival of sorts since the publication of critical works, a biography and two major retrospectives in Helsinki and Pori.
Life
His life can safely be characterized as epitomizing northern madness to the hilt. Among his local contemporaries of Kittilä in Lapland he had the reputation of a drunken artist masturbating at home and painting furiously.
Although he had traveled widely, spending time in e.g. Paris and New York, one "noose around his neck" (beside his perverse urges) was always the provincial and narrow-minded mental perimeter of his northern hometown.
While he lived there, his abode was a tiny cabin which was closer to a shack than a house. He called it his "Getsemane" after the biblical site, or sometimes his "castle in the clouds".
Upon his death two rumors spread among the local populace. One that he had in a drunken stupor collapsed into a snowbank, and died from exposure. The other that he had hung himself. The latter was more understandable, since several of his self-portraits featured a hangmans noose around his neck, and several other of his paintings also used the symbology of hanging.
His real reason of death from pneumonia on his bed, without anyone checking to see how he was doing, was perhaps regrettably more fitting to an artist, but not to the figure they knew.
During his life he had many artist friends such as Reidar Särestöniemi, but only two real supporters; his mother, and a soul-mate/muse he found in Maj-Lis Pitkänen, a psychiatrist specialising in troubled children who shared his morbid view of the world.
After his death Maj-Lis fought a protracted and bitter battle to raise an appropriate cenotaph for "Kalle". The monument shaped like a stylized seed or bullroarer was viewed by the parish as being pagan, or even representing female sexual organs. Many voices proclaimed that it was a mistake to let the "pervert" be buried into holy ground in anycase.
With time the notables from Kittilä who opposed the monument strenously have instead begun to express pride that an internationally renowned artist is a local boy.
The art of Kalervo Palsa
Kalervo palsa used an incredibly varied palette of techniques and materials even including housepaint. The subjects with the richest content, generally received the most hurried and crude treatment. The over 1000 self-portraits on the other hand generally were treated at the very least with competent technique.
Mostly the works explore in graphic detail the dark side of humanity in general and his native northern regions specifically. Grotesque sexuality, sadism, homosexuality, bisexuality and a general emotionally frigid paraphilia reflects his own inner turmoil and is a reaction to his hometowns mental atmosphere.
Palsa did have a brief fling with abstract art while staying in New York, but as he recounts in his diary, that phase came to an abrupt halt when one day he saw a passed out black man sprawled on a subway bench.
Besides Hieronymous Bosch, his work has been compared to that of Frida Kahlo.
Notable works
- Turva ("Security") is a painting of a giant anus surrounded by images of all the Boschian horrors that a sensitive artist could imagine. At the center of the painting the anus opens as a window showing a man blissfully seated in a rockingchair seemingly untouched by the horrors.
- Missi Paskantaa ("A Beauty Pageant Contestant Takes a Dump") a black-and-white inked comic strip. The work consists of a few pages of Pythonian deadpan illustrated technical description of the practical ramifications of even beauty pageant contestants having to defecate. It finally ends with an illustrated listing of varieties of consistency of faeces that might come out such a girls anus with attendant analysis.
- Eläkeläinen Muistelee ("Retiree Reminisces") A black-and-white inked comic-book recounting a plethora of highly surreal homosexual sadistic tales.
- Miehen Kuukautiset ("The Male Period") Painting of a mans bleeding anus.