Putin’s critic

Artist Kaj Stenvall ridicules and criticizes power by painting Putin every day, putting his subject in a wide variety of settings.

Written by roope Lipasti transLated by Christina saarinen

The studio floor is littered with dozens of paintings, either drying or just otherwise complete. Most of them depict Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin, but Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, former president of the United States Donald Trump, and even a few Finnish politicians make their appearances. But by and large, the paintings are of Putin. He sits in The Hague looking miserable, stares in a mirror and Hitler looks back, is hiding in a toilet bowl. And so on.

Although you might imagine otherwise, Stenvall didn’t start painting Putin after last year’s invasion of Ukraine. He actually started much earlier, the last time Putin attacked Ukraine in 2014, when the world hadn’t yet taken much notice.

“Actually, it started with the Olympics in Sochi. I watched it on TV and saw how Putin was strutting around among the athletes there. Even before that, he had appeared shirtless in public and built up his macho image, but that was when I really started paying attention to it. It was just too much. A little while later, Crimea was annexed, which was the last straw and got me to start making these. It was a concrete sign of Putin’s agenda, which was not staying inside his own country,” Stenvall explains.

A villain and a hero

The explicitly political paintings were also a counterweight to what Stenvall had been doing for the last 30 years or so. He is famous for his duck paintings, which feature humanoid ducks in all kinds of situations. Often, they are pastiches of famous paintings, with the main character replaced by a duck. Stenvall’s duck paintings have been extremely popular, which has given Stenvall the financial leeway to paint Putins – because there can’t be too many people who want one on their living room wall, can there?

“It’s hard to say. There have been a lot of inquiries, but I don’t know if it’s a question of putting them on display or an investment. In any case, I haven’t sold them. Well, I did sell two: one to a member of parliament in Berlin and the other to a member of parliament in Prague. But the idea is to keep the collection together and expand it, so that at some point I can have a bigger exhibition.”

Actually, there is also one painting in Ukraine: a year ago at midsummer, a young Ukrainian celebrity died on the front and became something of a national hero, so Stenvall made a painting of him. The painting was supposed to be sold at auction, with the money donated to Ukraine, but in the end, the painting went to Ukraine along with the Finnish foreign minister, Pekka Haavisto

“It was a show of sympathy for the Ukrainian people. I have also done paintings of Zelensky. It’s kind of nice to paint heroes, too, and not always just villains. On the whole, this is a mission, something important. And because I am able to do it, I feel that it’s also a kind of duty. At the same time, it’s a way to unload my own anxieties about the war, through critique and ridicule.”

Back to the underground

In fact, painting Putin – or other powerful people – is ironically not so terribly far from Stenvall’s duck-themed paintings. Through the ducks, Stenvall was able to explore different aspects of humanity, and a similar thing is going on with the Putins and the others, though the war soon brought its tragic addition to the mix.

Politics itself is not a new thing for Stenvall and his generation: Originally from Tampere, Stenvall was born in 1951 and started studying art in Turku in 1971. It was still the time of the underground movement, and all kinds of politicization – including of art – continued throughout the ’70s.

“The underground was one of the reasons I came to Turku. It combined different kinds of elements, including from real life, and there was always a message or a point, and that’s actually what I’ve come back to now. I’m interested in how people experience their position, the fact that they have power. I’m trying to get to the person there, deep inside. For example, the painting of Lavrov is based on a news photo in which he was criticizing the West with a Western watch and cellphone in his hand. I put him in a hoodie, so he would look like a rapper. In the painting, his face reflects sheer helplessness, the fact that he is completely lost.”

From the media to media art

According to Stenvall, the response to his Putin paintings has been largely bewildered.

“When I put the first images on Twitter in 2014, I got a few comments, but people from Finland in particular were confused and somehow afraid of the issue. Finlandization was quite strong even then. One art critic’s column ran under the headline ‘Does it make sense or not?’ quoting a song by the ’70s Finnish rock group Sleepy Sleepers. The message was that maybe I shouldn’t make paintings like these because it’s dangerous to mock the leader of a neighboring country.”

Dangerous or not, it’s clear that Stenvall is making internet art, or, more broadly, media art: Stenvall pulls material from the media, refines it, and puts it back into the media. The image that goes out is always different from when it came to him:

“The pieces themselves are quite small, so I can do them quickly. Online, it makes no difference what size the original is. The idea is to be able to comment on things practically in real time.”

Stenvall’s pace and work ethic are formidable. In the morning, he takes his kid to school – the trip serves as a kind of commute –before returning to his home studio to start painting. At that point, it’s nine o’clock. By the afternoon, the painting will be ready to be photographed and put online.

“Spontaneity is the thing, getting it done all at once. It’s three and a half hours of really intense pressure, and afterwards my head is spinning. Developing the subject matter is a big and time-consuming part because I want each painting to be different and to have a specific point. I’ve done maybe 130 or 140 of these, so quite a lot of angles have already been used.” s