What happens to a landscape when it stops presenting itself to our gaze?
We are accustomed to consuming places as images. Landscapes are photographed, shared, saved and recognized. Famous landmarks appear from the same familiar viewpoints, nature becomes panorama, and travel becomes a sequence of visual highlights. A place is expected to reveal itself — as fully, beautifully and immediately as possible.
Sergey Pietilä resists this way of looking.
The landscapes in his pastels do not pose. They do not present themselves as perfect views, nor do they lead the eye directly toward what might seem to be the most important motif. A castle may be pushed to the edge of the composition, a house may disappear behind the crown of a tree, architecture may be seen through a window, or a garden may only gradually emerge behind a mass of hydrangeas. A tree, a gate, a shadow or a rock can become more important than the motif we initially assume to be the subject of the picture.
Pietilä is not interested in the representative view of a place, but in the moment of personal perception.
His travels provide him with motifs, yet travel itself is not the subject of his art. What matters is how a place reveals itself to the eye — and how much it withholds at the same time.
This is precisely what makes these works especially relevant today. At a time when almost every place seems already photographed, categorized and visually available, Pietilä sets a different experience against instant recognition: slow looking.
His visual language follows a recurring inner logic:
dark or intensely colored ground → active drawing → fragmentation → unexpected composition → burst of color → a space the viewer has to discover for themselves.
Pastel plays a central role in this process. Pietilä uses it not only for the immediacy of its color, but also for its openness. Lines remain visible, surfaces are not fully closed, and the colored support participates actively in the image. Drawing and painting overlap. Some passages are precisely described, while others are only suggested.
The result is not an illusionistic landscape into which we can simply step. The viewer has to assemble the space for themselves.
The exhibition PLACES THAT REFUSE TO POSE follows this movement in three chapters.
I. In the Way of the Gaze
Rio de Janeiro. Antigo 363 · View from the Window · Night · Long Shadows
The exhibition begins with works in which access to the place is deliberately obstructed.
In “View from the Window”, the landscape is structured by the architecture of the window. We look outside, yet remain on our side of the boundary. The view is possible — and at the same time interrupted.
In “Night”, the dark mass of a tree occupies a large part of the pictorial space. The house behind it appears almost incidentally. Darkness is not merely an atmospheric background here, but an active force that limits visibility.
This principle becomes even more radical in “Rio de Janeiro. Antigo 363”. Organic forms, masonry, the gate and darkness overlap so strongly that the place can only be deciphered gradually. The image refuses a clear hierarchy.
“Long Shadows” likewise transforms familiar landscape space into a network of tree trunks, dark lines and luminous fields.
These works challenge a simple expectation:
Why should a place grant us an unobstructed view?
II. The Place Loses Its Contours
Five Vikings · Waterfall · Autumn · Red Oak
In the second chapter, landscape increasingly detaches itself from concrete description.
In “Five Vikings”, coast, water and vegetation become large fields of color. The composition hovers on the border between landscape and abstraction.
In “Waterfall”, rocks turn into heavy, rhythmically structured bodies. Water appears only as a bright movement between them. The topographical situation matters less than the interaction of mass, line and color.
“Autumn” organizes the forest through repeated pale trunks and intense yellow and orange tones. The natural motif becomes rhythm.
And in “Red Oak”, the tree seems almost to dissolve into pure graphic energy: trunk, branches and crown emerge from black, red, green and violet marks on a colored ground.
Here the exhibition’s question shifts.
No longer: What place is this?
But rather:
When does a place stop being representation — and begin to become painting?
These works reveal particularly clearly Pietilä’s contemporary approach to landscape. He remains connected to the observed motif, yet allows it to emerge anew through color, line, cropping and personal perception.
III. The Place Remains
Courtyard with Hydrangeas · Château de Saumur
After the concentrated energy of the second chapter, the gaze becomes quieter in the final section.
Yet here too, Pietilä does not offer the viewer a classic panoramic view.
In “Courtyard with Hydrangeas”, the large violet-pink blossoms dominate the foreground. Only beyond them do we discover the house. Near and far compete with one another; the presumed main subject remains at a distance.
In “Château de Saumur”, something similar happens in a different way. The famous building is not placed monumentally at the center. It appears to one side, while broad areas of sky, wall and landscape determine the composition.
The familiar place thereby loses its function as a tourist sight.
It becomes a place again.
Perhaps this is the central experience of the exhibition: a place can never be fully possessed — not through travel, not through photography, and not through an image. What remains is a fragment, a memory, a particular light, a color, a distance.
Pietilä’s landscapes therefore tell us less about where the artist has been than about how he saw while he was there.
Landscape Beyond the Postcard
PLACES THAT REFUSE TO POSE understands landscape neither as a decorative counterpart nor as a collection of beautiful views.
The exhibition presents places that resist the quick glance.
They are obscured, cropped, displaced, immersed in darkness or transformed by intense color. Precisely because of this, they acquire a presence of their own. The viewer is not given them as finished images, but has to discover them.
Perhaps this is the real invitation of these works: not to recognize a place immediately, but to give it the time to become visible.
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