PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi

4.12.2009 - 3.1.2010
Jaakko Koskentola
AT OTHER TABLES

I am looking at an image: but strangely I am being led away from it to somewhere else.
Jaakko Koskentola’s images lure the viewer away from their stated theme of loneliness. They whisper that the distances separating people are also a prerequisite for ever meeting anyone. Something else somewhere is coming through these images.

My mind wanders to ponder on a time when our small group began to play ’truth or dare’ in a bar. When it came to my turn to take on a dare, my friends thought they’d bewilder me. They told me to take my time and choose the most beautiful and breath-taking woman in the bar; then I was to go and tell her just that.
A thrilling mission, if she reacts – even a little – even if only sometime afterwards.
Of course I didn’t manage quite as well as I imagined or planned (one should always be careful with wine when transcending your own limits).

All those beautiful faces and the clear, wounding yearnings they beget, touches separated and joined by distances.
No kiss, no warmth of skin on skin, but still… touch-like.
Lightly, airily it falls to man to become attracted to other spiritual bodies.

Do I fall in love briefly, desperately time and after again in these bars, at the tables of bars like this? Falling in love: the airy flight of a butterfly (what wouldn’t be corporeal?), a momentary joy over the miraculous existence of the world. A deep caressing cut.
The same cut only brings pain and anxiety if distance does not deliver its flip side, the promise of a touch. The words of joy only hurt those who are alone. Words fail me: what can I say to someone to whom the seduction of touch only delivers its dimension of distance when I can’t even help myself?

If there exists a law of touching (Thou shall touch!), there must also exist the law of falling in love. One must fall in love time and again to these beings that one encounter, these delicate vessels of life that are so much like me but, at the same time, so different from me in their every character and thought.
All our experiences and performances striving for sublime return to this unfathomable beauty that the warmth of a stranger’s smile thaws for us.

The path between tables is like an orbit that makes touch possible. One must touch again and again, for its code definitely includes tact.
It is not tactful withdraw from touching – and this is not even possible in life. It is equally important to not to touch too much. Touching is not clinging; it is opening oneself. One must touch, one must be touchable.
Elliptic reencounters chart distance as a prerequisite for touching. Without the limit of distance we become numb, our senses cool like embers left unguarded. One must return, time and again, to the correct distance.
We have to explore touch, moderation, the avoidance of excess – but not because of any external moral code but to become sensitized. To refine that part of our humanity that enjoys sensually.

With Jaakko Koskentola’s images I begin to explore the possibility, which at first appears metaphorical or lyrical, that touch is something intrinsically entwined with seeing.
Can the eye touch; can it be one of the sensory apparatuses of touch? Can a look console, from afar, or is it only an angel of longing and missing, of distance?
Can distance be, as well as a promise of a touch, also touch itself?

The unreality of Koskentola’ images are in their reality, which is strangely leading. I have seen, felt, experienced all this but this is not what I see and have seen. All this, this scene, is beside me, outside, like the look of a photographic apparatus forgotten at that (not this) table. Am I that much of a stranger even to myself?
Naturally, in some images Koskentola has fallen into the temptation of being a photographer, pointing with his index finger to someone special. However, if these images were removed I wouldn’t realize the enthralling state of being elsewhere of some other images. Faced with his images I am balancing on a feeling, on the transitions drawn between photograph and no-longer-photograph. The correct distance, correct time and timing; like a touch and its tactfulness.

Koskentola’s images guard unattainability itself and they bring this distance visible, touchable. It is like his images are pointing at beside and past one whereas photographs usually try to capture and own what they see, try to place it ‘here’. Jaakko Koskentola’s images are there, somewhere, like talk at other people’s tables, far away yet nearby.
No longer there; here. Ever closer.

Ari Kakkinen,
November 2009