Light, time and energy are the underlying driving forces behind the photography of the Finnish photographer Niko Luoma. They are perhaps more important even than colour – though the use of colour also has an important place in Luoma’s work, since it is self-evident that colour manifests itself through the manipulations of light. Yet the twofold nature of time is also made explicit in Luoma’s photographs, and discernibly so through his developed technical understanding of light. The titles of his series Cronos (2006–2007) and Kairos (2009) refer directly to the differential nature of time: the former as conventional sequential time and the latter a sense of time as an interstitial moment which remains in the indeterminate conditions of duration.¹

While in the earlier Cronos series the drawings were derived from the abstracted effects of light as it fell upon objects on the artist’s studio table, in Kairos initial discoveries in nature or sound effects are turned into studio-based abstract drawings. Drawings thus form an extended tool that leads directly to Luoma’s light-based photographic procedures. The Kairos and Cronos images are a series of multiple exposures transformed by numerous superimpositions of light, the distinction between the two series being that while Cronos emphasizes line and geometry, suggesting the very nature of temporal linearity, the lines within the Kairos images often express striation and/or hatching, creating a tendency towards vortex-like centrality. The images are presented in variable mid-sizes in C-Print/Diasec, retained as a single image, but having a complex embedded synchronicity of content that elides the initial temporal superimpositions of light.

In visual terms, while closely related to abstract painting and drawing, the principal quality of Luoma’s work is the fusion of time, light and memory. This is evident in his Fresh Paintings series (2004), in which he painted and photographed in eight different colours a year’s supply of stacked newspapers. It is also just as evident, perhaps, in the pictorial abstraction of the photographic series he entitled Pure Information Praxis, in which the images also appear to be derived from pure abstract painting, though each, in turn, finds its source in a given landscape or portrait. The same notions of derived transformation applies to locations Luoma has recalled from memory and reconstructed in his studio: Memory Sights: Bad Water Basin, Death Valley (2005), or Memory Sights: Chicago From Memory (Arrivals & Departures) (2003).

In the figurative image series Every Now Is a New Past (2006), Luoma is always seeking his own sense of kairos. As he puts it: ‘For me nature is a stage, as well as a metaphor for this phenomenon when looking at the future passing through the present, becoming a memory.’ Amidst the chaos of everyday energetic forces there remains the possibility of abstract experimentation. This requires by necessity an exceptional camera knowledge and expertise, and box cameras with multiple inserted mirrors are needed to capture and control the infinite transitions and variations of light effects.

However, materializing the immaterial seems to be Luoma’s ultimate aim, making light energy visible. In his most recent series, called Symmetrium, he has created images that seem deliberately to challenge Euclidian or Platonic symmetries, suggesting the microcosmos on the one hand, and the macrocosmos on the other. Sometimes redolent of contrived vortices and the time-travel images of contemporary sciencefiction movies, the layered superimpositions of different densities of coloured light achieve anywhere between fifteen and fifty thousand line marks on a single sheet of film. Again using drawing, and a simple mathematical system in the planning of each, the cubes, lozenges, octagons and rectangles emerge as an optical force field of energy. Developed from the Kairos and Cronos series, Symmetrium pursues what Luoma has always claimed for his art: ‘my work focuses on energy as opposed to matter.’

¹ The distinction between the two Greek terms is that while one, chronos, is ‘quantitative’, the other, kairos is ‘qualitative’, the phenomenon of insight that draws upon circumstantial chance and the opportune moment. See Eric Charles White, Kaironomia: On the Will-to-Invent (Ithaca and London:Cornell University Press, 1987).