Skies Captured (2001), a new piece by Lehtonen, was shown for the first time in Budapest this year. The work took the form of a triptych and was thus linked to the tradition of altar paintings. Each of its three panels showed an evenly blue sky. It was like a minimalist and monochromatic painting. But it also distanced itself from painting because it was made with video projectors.

Contemporary monochromes tend to have a strong corporeal power. But Lehtonen´s work has closer affinity with an older, modernistic tradition that concentrates on the spirit and not on the body. Although Lehtonen is not the kind of artist who likes to site the history of art, the video projections are clearly linked to a series of modernist monochromes from Malevich to Rothko and Klein.

The minimalistic Skies Captured can be connected to Lehtonen´s series of images of desire. To long for heaven is to long for a place to which one still lacks access. It may also be just a place beyond the horizon. In a classic song of the melancholic Finnish brand of tango, the land of happiness is a place beyond the wide sea. An icon of Finnish rock music, Rauli Badding Somerjoki, sang about stars he could not reach. This deep longing for happiness is an integral part of Finnish popular culture.

Here in Istanbul - on the border between Europe and Asia - the work functions differently. It is a simultaneous , live recording of the east and the west skies over Istanbul, which are projected as a diptych on the floor of the exhibition space. Since the colour of the sky varies, the work takes distance from the monochromatic idea, and can thus be attributed new meanings, connected with the actual, multilayered questions of the Occident and the Orient.