Juha Joro works and experiments mainly using different techniques of graphic arts. Joro's pictures are composed of series, every picture working both separately and as a part of a wider entirety. Joro uses mythologies and primitivity as a basis of his pictures - too subjective experience can take a mythological form, when the subjectivity becomes universally applicable. In the series the light and the shadows have an important position. They are connected to the idea of time, which is not only the linear, everyday time but the one outside of our understanding.

Characteristically Juha Joro connects a kind of primitivism to the abstract form of time. The contrasts are also essential in his pictures, e.g. certain emptiness, that still can contain some features of chaos and that becomes concrete through openings. In contrast to these hollow elements there may be a very firm structure; in his series there often is carefully constructed walls. The curving form can also create a structure (for the pictures), when simultaneously it seems to sustain the emptiness and the chaos. Despite his often dark and simple colour scale the light of the pictures is probably the most important element.

"The Wall", ink painting, year 1985

Joro is also an excellent drawer, whose lines sometimes remind of Japanese artist's self-assured marks on a blank, white paper. He has admitted, that he is interested in Japanese and more widely oriental influences, even though the world is becoming more and more European. He uses geometric marks so that they are settled somewhere between pictures and letters. The mode of expression is naturally visual but the pictures can be read as if they were poems. Therefore the connection to Japanism or the art of the old world exists. Joro is versatile, philosophically directed artist.

Tove Holländer, Turku Art Museum

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