Henrietta Lehtonen´s art is a multiple challenge to the spectator. Her production is truly diversified - her mere techniques have so many dimensions - yet harmonious. The harmony is partly explained by Lehtonen´s determined artistic search. Her project of learning to understand herself brings unity to her works. She possesses the admirable skill of achieving visual purity of expression without a formalistic straitjacket. Her art radiates life sustaining faith and optimism. Vanity is a central theme, balanced by desire to find or the prospect of finding a purpose.

These factors can be sensed in individual works, but most clearly when we look at her entire output.

Besides diverse categories of expression, Lehtonen´s art is characterized by multilayered thematic material. Her artistic thought is based on a supple strategy of acquiring information. Scientific, psychologic or even astrologic information seem to be equally valuable. The artist studies the biological layers of human genetics, evolution - or she may be intrigued by the information deposited in her hairbrush. She is fascinated by Rupert Sheldrake, the alternative scientist, whose restless curiosity leads him to experiment wild hypotheses. She seems to look for a fracture, a defective gene, anything that would help speed evolution and lead to something new. Art and the internal discourse of the art world do not seem to be major sources for Lehtonen´s thought.

Henrietta Lehtonen´s art has been characterized by her exceptional ability to address and delight the audience with beauty. The verbally talented artist puts it this way: "I have noticed that sometimes when I have completed a work which is better than I had wished, it feels as if a strange crystal had descended from the other world to radiate above ours for a moment."

Now Lehtonen wants to distance herself from beauty. She thinks beauty, as well as success, can be a "trap". She has set out on a journey towards disorder, at times embarrassing. Still, her art seems to retain the power to touch the spectator. The artist's own characterization of her work Light (1997), exhibited in St. John's Chapel in Turku Cathedral: "It is a very simple work intended to move something inside the spectator." This is a phrase that can be generalized to apply to the artist’s entire output, often playful, yet very serious.

As Lehtonen turns from general subjects into the theme of self-understanding, the study of conflict, dirtiness and ugliness becomes a dominant idea. Disorder coincidence, debris - she sees big potential in all these. She wants to show not only beauty and purity but also the reverse side - loss of "innocence" and "dirt". The idea of Paradise seems to contain the inevitability of losing it. But perhaps this is already the beginning of something new.

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Since her debut in the beginning of the 90s Henrietta Lehtonen has risen fast in Finnish and international world of art. In 1993 she was presented the fist award by the Urpo and Maija Lahtinen Foundation set up to support talented young artists. In the following year she had a private exhibition at the Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki. At an exhibition called Prejudices at the Liljevalchs Art Gallery in Stockholm Lehtonen got plenty of positive attention. This led to further invitations, such as contribution to the Extra Muros exhibition curated by Bart de Baere at the Ghent Museum of Contemporary Art in 1994. In 1995 the artist was invited to the Istanbul Biennial of Contemporary Art. In L´enigma del Campo, a project organized by Markku Valkonen for the 1995 Biennial of Venice, Lehtonen was the focus of much attention.

One of the main strategies of Lehtonen´s early career was to deal with the fundamental questions of being a woman, which she approached from the feminist point of view. She commented on the tradition of "women’s handiwork" in her installations using various "techniques" such as embroidery (Girls´Needlework, 1992), porcelain painting (Porcelain Tower, 1993, Coffee Cups, 1994). But at that time already, the pure-white neorococo porcelain, though in itself erotically loaded, was soiled by "painting" on the surface with fingers and picturing the excretions and biological functions of the human body.

Galerie Kaj Forsblom´s exhibition Return of Winter in Helsinki in 1995 at first enticed you into childhood discourse by showing funny mouse figures. In the back room your feelings changed as you faced works such as Silly Bambi in the Forest, Frozen Bambi, Bambi being strangled and Bambi does a Blow Job. The icons and myths of innocence projected on childhood collided in a memorable way with sexual desire and even violence.

In the artist’s impressive installation Dream (1992) video already played a major role. Later, projected video images have become an increasingly important technique. A kind of culmination was represented by the artist’s video installation Infant displayed in San Giovanni in Bragora church in Venice in connection with the 1995 Biennial.

In the video installation Dream boys dream of girls and girls dream of babies. Child is also the theme of Infant. Ecclesiastical context gives the reading of the work several new dimensions. The newborn, of course, is associated with the child Jesus, but he is depicted alive, not dead as is conventionally done in traditional crucifix and Pietà images. There is an interesting analogy between fresco painting and the modern video-projected image.

In these works Lehtonen has created a visually alluring image of her idea of a kind of "state of happiness". It is like a compact picture of our innermost goals - before we sink into cynicism. While she does not directly comment on the view of Finnish popular mythology of our collective national characteristics, it is true that search for an unattainable land of happiness does have a key role in the Finnish soul.

Besides conceptual dimensions, Henrietta Lehtonen´s works are united by a peculiar visual attraction. But she refuses easy triumphs. "Risks suit me." She does not like to repeat a theme already used. She refuses to be unidimensional as an artist - to make a product out of herself. Here, she joins Marcel Duchamp who forced himself to overthrow himself "to avoid following his own taste."

Lehtonen is very critical of her work. She is constantly looking for new ways of expressing herself and employing her often unusual artistic instruments. While she likes to distance herself from the modernistic requirement of instrumental purity, she adopts the modernistic trend of simplification, reduction, stripping down. And even if she in many ways fits under the broad concept of postmodernism, the artist is clearly connected with the modernistic tradition through avant-garde. Still, her works are never just studies of form, they always mean something.

A major theme has been "purity encrusted by dirt". Human development and self-understanding seem to be growing in importance. Lehtonen´s subjects may be personal - but also general in a way to touch wider audiences.

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Henrietta Lehtonen´s latest solo exhibition was staged at the Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum in spring 1997. In autumn 1996 the undersigned had the first actual discussions with the artist about the contents of the show. I was impressed by the seemingly endless abundance of ideas of which Lehtonen´s notebooks are documents of. Some ideas survived. One exhibit was called Blanket Ghost (1997). A figure wrapped in a grey blanket was seen behind a misty panel of Plexiglas. It was a striking image of an unknown thought yet to be formed.

Henrietta Lehtonen thinks of an individual work and of its influence on the whole, both at the same time. Individual installations made up one big entity, an exhibition called Manuscript.
Focus - Studio - Transit (1997) was the biggest installation. The artist moved her whole workshop from Tampere to the museum in Turku. We saw old works of art, crates, building material and junk. A beam of light circled the room revealing constantly new spots for inspection. The meanings of the work are multilevel. While the room was a hidden miniretrospection, it also raised questions about reality and representation - and of the prospects and meanings of material: "What should I throw away? A poor work is not worth storing, the material has been wasted anyway. Good junk is better, it still has the whole life before it.

Biography, according to Lehtonen, embraces the satisfaction of exhibitionism to the author and that of voyeurism to the spectator. The artist reveals a part of herself and the audience can take a look at it. Hypnosis video (1997) was one of the key works at the exhibition. Lehtonen had been hypnotized and the hypnotist made her questions . She believes that we already know answers to all our questions even if we may not always be able to put them into words.

With this kind of works the artist tries to analyse herself - but also the possibilities of art. Finally, the exhibition was not "a manuscript for three-dimensional image", as intended. Old ideas formed a basis on which new things were built. The Construction Site Video, a House is Demolished and a New is Built (1997) is a representation of this idea. The work can also be seen as an allegory of the evolution of human understanding.

Art work has been compared with alchemy, the pursuit of changing ordinary metals into gold. Henrietta Lehtonen reminds me of this comparison. Often, transmutation is simple, sometimes it is done just by adding immaterial, reflected light, as she did in her fascinatingly beautiful work called Light Phenomenon, in Fact a Work of Art without a Name (1997).