Samuli Heimonen

For me, painting is the same as building. You have basic blocks and the superstructure that is behind every picture. I like the idea that you can see inside things. You can see the structure and all the individual parts.

Painting is a good tool to bring up stuff that you don’t normally see, or you see but don’t understand. For me this is the basic idea of surreal picture: something quite normal becomes something exiting and intriguing. This surreal world sleeps inside everything.

My recent pictures feature animals. I use them as a metaphor for variety of themes: love, death, longing, desire. Animals tend to have very strong symbolic meanings. I use these existing meanings, sometimes break them and invent new ones