Tomi Leppänen: The Void

The Void is an installation designed for Luonnos-ikkuna. It consists of a gray and white checkered background pattern, and the empty space in front of it. Is the exhibition a dystopian example of the visual culture in future: This may be the only content available due to the cuts the Finnish Government is making in the funding of the cultural sector.

For millennia, philosophers and physicists have tried to create a perfect void, an empty space in which there is neither matter nor energy. According to Aristotle, the void cannot exist because space cannot consist of nothing. According to philosopher and mathematician Thales of Miletus, simply thinking about nothing showed that nothing was something, so it could not be nothing after all.

The visual element of the installation is a “transparency grid”, a checkered pattern familiar from image editing programs, symbolising a transparent background. According to Leppänen, the exhibition can be thought of as an empty PSD image file transferred to the real world; the viewers stopping in front of Luonnos-ikkuna, unknowingly place themselves as a layer in this file.

The exhibition presents a void, a space where there is nothing. Depending on the viewer, the void can be seen as an opportunity, a clean base that invites to fill it with new content. It can also be seen as a state emptied of meaning, a space devoid of matter.

Tomi Leppänen is a creative designer whose work combines graphic design, design, and art equally. Leppänen relies on a minimalist aesthetic, basing his artistic work on research, observation of the processes, logic, simplification, and small insights. Recently, Tomi Leppänen’s work has been seen in a solo exhibition at the Pimento Gallery in Oulu, as well as in the exhibition of the Circle collective at the Pori Art Museum. Leppänen was awarded the Graphic Designer of the Year award in 2023.

“What exists could not have come into being from nothing. Because if it had come into being, it would have had to come into being either from nothing or from something. It could not have come from nothing, because there is no nothing, because nothing, or a vacuum, does not exist.” –Parmenides (c. 510 BCE)

LUONNOS-IKKUNA
Siltasaarenkatu 18-20, Helsinki
grafia.fi/luonnos/ikkuna