Inari Krohn : Daunters

I see a spiral of people and it’s difficult to see where some people end and other begin. Every person has a minimum of three colors, which reminds me of a carnival. It might be someone’s nightmare.

I also see a lot of chaos. Normally I would associate all these colors with being happy and bright. Their facial expressions, and the fact that everyone seems to be for himself, creates this chaotic feeling.

I think there might be two groups of people; the ones near the front might be chasing the ones in the background. The person in the middle is wearing a mask with a different skin color, and the expression of the mask is scary. The combination of colors is exhaustive to my eyes.

To me it turned from a carnival into a violent riot. You can even hear the sound from the painting.

In a carnival the power relations are turned upside down, that’s why I think the color red is used. Most of the people appear to be bare-footed, which to me says that they come from low-income families.

This is in sharp contrast with the other works, which have had a clearly Finnish setting, while this clearly does not. There is something dreamlike about it. Looking at the composition, typically when you have action in the foreground, you have quietness in the background, to support the foreground; here you have action in the foreground and the background. There are also problems with perspective as some people in the background are taller than the people in front of them – but if we think in terms of a carnival, nothing makes sense, and everything is turned upside down, but it might also be a dream or hallucination where rules no longer apply. In a naturalistic sense, the proportions are all wrong.