PeakDash

Something odd happened to Juhani Palmu's people. Once Finland's best known painter gave us bulging, healthy women, stripped to the buff, steaming in saunas and beating themselves to health. These days his figures have become incredibly elongated, ghostly and impossibly slender, and you're hard pushed to recognise them as human.

The answer to that change, declares Palmu, lies in the stars. Well, in satellite communication anyway. 'Once Finland was a tiny country, a periphery, inward looking and only concerned with our roots,' he said at the opening of his exhibition at The Rotunda this week.

'Now we have a sky system, we have satellite. It has made such a difference. Now small countries can keep in touch with major cultural developments. Before it always felt like we were copying. What was contemporary in Finland was already old in New York.' But despite all that, he says, we're still absolutely rubbish at relationships, especially at communicating within them. Why, we only have to look at Finland's 10,000 unmarried mothers. Palmu, 56, an artist who has shown in countries around the world and who has ateliers in three, is hooked by the fact relationships are the most common topic of conversation wherever he goes.

So his new pictures, Intimacy, Wanderer, Connection and so on, all touch on our everlasting obsession with human relations, a primary concern even in this global age, he believes. They speak of groups of individuals with a shared heritage who still cannot communicate. 'In other times maybe I had different themes but always the same philosophy. Even our most up-to-date movies speak about relationships - look at American Beauty.' His new people, who have the length of creatures inseparable from their own shadows, are up-close but somehow not personal. Though clearly they need to be in touch, few face each other. There is distance and separateness between them. Mysterious, angular, almost geometric, they strangely manage to be both threatening and intriguing.

They are lost in solitude yet have a relationship to each other. And they are this peculiar mixture: unsettling yet joyful. These groups in his unpretentious paintings are often accompanied by symbols of communication - Viking boats, birds, Finnish spirals of life - which lend the works a naive aspect.

'People can read my pictures like you would read rock art,' he says. 'I believe we have a collective memory, that makes us able to look at these works and the symbols and feel they are somehow familiar. We see our roots more easily - we just watch them on TV.' Palmu, who is now displaced enough to no longer feel his own roots lie in Finland, nevertheless remains faithful to his home country. His pictures are passionate about it. They reflect the long winter shadows, the spectacular light, cool intense colours and simple shapes. They have great harmony, something the nudes - which make up part of this show and work well in contrast - also share.

The nudes are too big for their canvases, bursting out of the narrow confines of Finnish life just as Palmu has done. Idealised sensual figures, they don't have specific features. Breasts, for instance, are Hong Kong friendly - nipple free. Several have a dangerous mass of hair that curves upwards and extends laterally. They lounge about in front of wooden sauna huts.

Palmu has become so interested in the symbolic significance of the sauna that he's incorporated it into one of his latest projects. If you're lucky enough to visit a small town in Carolina, you will see footage of three nude women steaming and soaking. 'People think it is some religious experience,' says Palmu, laughing.

It is, in fact, part of a four-way simultaneous live broadcast between America, Russia and Finland that includes views of rock paintings and of Palmu's own works. An attempt to show how much we share.

It's a far cry from the early days when Palmu's pictures were about old farmsteads, houses and churches in the country's historic villages. There were no doors, no windows then, only pictures that were very harmonious and peaceful. 'Even though I sometimes included some human figures into the landscape, my main focus of interest was the excitement caused by the interplay of lines.' The landscape has remained a theme, expressing a social cohesion, unchanged surroundings, internal peace. He has developed the graphic qualities, though, to 'prune' the landscape and 'leave as little as possible'. It was when Palmu moved away from Finland to Bonn in 1989 for a few years that his paintings became far less specific. Images became overlaid, richer, pictographic signs were introduced, the graphic style simplified. His work is now very defined.

These days he deals with the Finnish presence in the global community with the theme of communication. His paintings are symbols of what telecommunications can deliver worldwide. 'It takes a show of something completely new to really affect a culture's roots,' he says.

Paintings By Juhani Palmu. Until Apr 30. The Rotunda, One Exchange Square, Central. Tel: 2525 5385. 9am-7.30pm daily

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