ELIISA LOUKOLA

portrait of the portrait of Löttö

oil on canvas 110x110cm

2025

A small childhood painting becomes the axis where three speaking positions, looking, remembering, and being, overlap and intertwine. The work asks what happens in the overlay of text, image, and object: what kind of authorship emerges when the maker changes, when the “I” fractures across time, and when an artwork outlives the hand that made it?

Across the residency, the project has settled into these three viewpoints, whose frictions and overlaps compose the core of the work. The tensions between materiality and memory, between process and retrospect, between identity and its shifting edges form a continuum rather than a hierarchy.

Central to this constellation is 'portrait of the portrait of Löttö', an image of the painting’s back: a portrait not of a face but of structure, labour, and uncertainty. It exposes the interior architecture normally hidden from view, the folds, the staples, the frayed weave, like showing the inside of a mouth, the place where voice forms. It is a self-portrait twice removed: the object becomes the subject, the evidence of invisible labour becomes the visible surface, and the childhood and adult makers converge through the material that survives them both.

What emerges is a collaboration across time, a self-portrait distributed between bodies and materials, where the painting’s endurance becomes the thread stitching together the shifting identities of the one who made it.


PART OF THE GLOGAUAIR OPEN STUDIOS, DECEMBER 2025

LÖTTÖ