ROY AURINKO

With the exhibition Instant Repeater, presented at JARILAGER Gallery Köln, Aurinko turns to smell—the most archaic of senses. In a culture dominated by vision, smell remains stubbornly primitive: a survival tool, a social signal, a fast track to long-term memory. As the earliest faculty to develop in the womb, it enables recognition long before sight or language take hold. Unlike other senses, it connects directly to the limbic system, triggering emotion and recall with disarming speed: a sudden scent can pull us sharply backwards, into deeper, primary layers of our childhood.

As Aurinko puts it: ‘Specific smells connect me instantly to the things I most cherish and miss: mint ice cream and orange plastic chairs; the copier in the basement of my father’s workplace; fresh sand and cement at a construction site’. Just a handful of nostalgic recollection blocks from a Finnish childhood spent between nature and urban landscapes, a good combination of warmth and ugliness at the same time. One might even spot a method in his going back to old wells. The artist goes for a walk; when lucky, he catches a familiar scent, returns to the studio and, at some point, over sessions ranging from days to months, memories re-emerge on the canvas, bent in resonantly Aurinko-esque ways—indistinct yet strong, like the aroma of a Coffee machine brewing in the room next door. Smells painted like colours, following a synaesthetic logic, analytically sorted, as the titles are borrowed from the chemistry of the odour itself—Petrichor, for instance, naming the earthy scent released when rain hits dry soil.

This body of work marks a shift towards a more expressive, though still abstract, approach. Shapes now surface to create structure and depth, where earlier compositions were more dispersed, almost ‘all over the place’. Aurinko pays closer attention to negative space, working in a near-minimal register. His process is disciplined yet open-ended: a background is laid down first, followed by the selection of an initial three-colour palette. Using oil sticks, brushes or his hands, he sketches the first lines before entering a more physical phase, where moments of intensity alternate with spells of meditative contemplation. At a certain point, the painting starts to speak back, often offering its own solution to a blockage. A work is finished only when it startles him—producing a sense of unease, a je ne sais quoi. As he insists, ‘the mystery must stay unsolved’.

From one perspective, these paintings can be read as a form of family memoir, shaped as a reckoning. Aurinko often alludes to a conflictual paternal figure and to the impulse to repaint his childhood as softer than it may actually have been, perhaps in the hope of a reconciliation, however provisional or mythologised. Yet his way of painting does not privilege private anecdote at the expense of larger social narratives. Nostalgia also carries a subtle, quasi-political undertone: a low-key resistance to the flattened sensibility of the digital twenty-first century and a longing for forms of experience that felt more collective, more authentic, more tactile, more materially grounded. Aurinko’s gaze drifts back to the late 1970s and early 1980s – not as a golden age per se, but as a moment in which such conditions still seemed possible before their erosion, or disappearance, in contemporary life.