A GLOWING MIND AND DROPS ON GLASS

Who or what makes an artist "a star"; the critics, politicians, the high and mighty art-circles or the art-buyers being dazzled by "The Holy Grail"?
The sensual lime and dejected purple are new elements in Timo Mähönen´s "artistic grammar". A monumental portion of emotional exoticism creates an image of a diligent and vital Jack-of-all-trades and painter whose ferocious power of creativity hits you beyond the average grasp like a super-cyclone. Aqueducts, rosaries, oak-trees, lurking ravens and solitary human beings are so potent symbolistic images that the beholder turns melancholic and is struck by romantic feelings. Mähönen´s use of colours is almost wagnerian in its pompousness. One gets a feeling of Alice in Wonderland having got her medicinal prescriptions wrong.

Lavish use of solemn and deliberate oil-colours spread in many layers with a palette-knife, a virtuoso use of the stroke results in a seducing, functional harmony. This must surely be the extasy of the "angel of colours". Depending on the sensual lime and other sweetly tasting colour-lavines one does not at once seem to appreciate the fact that the colours of the palette really are quite logically and deliberately used. A certain amount of simplicity makes harmony and balance still not giving the impression of the artist being vane or distancing himself from what he is doing. Everything is loaded with meaning. Cross-roads, cats, playfully reflexing will-o´-the wisps or the distant, glistening Northern lights.
To someone knowing progressive and hard-core rock music the paintings of Timo Mähönen will seem familiar; purple being the King, a road to Hell, a harvest. The aqueduct is a representation of Life, empty rooms the images of Man, rosaries and junctions universal symbols of rootless- and homelessness, cats being spiritual beings, passages to hidden worlds.
Mähönen paints with feverish intensity, almost with a feeling of violence splashing colours about with primitive insanity. He gives the colours freedom to rejoice seemingly without control. The colour-splendour is astoundingly stylish and fresh, a logical consequence of a through the years accumulated fulfilled technical virtuosity combined with an uncanny flight of imagination and intellectual deliberation. Timo Mähönen is the Prometheus of his time, a visionary, culturally Finnish-Carelian, an orphan in whose hand the cup of colours "runneth over" with the drops of pain on glass.