Winner Jumalon

The work is in good condition overall, as is the canvas, which is clear and taut. Light wear and handling is evident around the edges of the painting but visible only upon close observation. Examination under ultraviolet light shows no sign of restoration. Unframed, on a Stretcher.
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The Roman military engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio illuminated an idea in Ten Books on Architecture that changed the world: “No temple can be put together coherently unless it conforms exactly to the principle relating the members of a well-shaped man.” He elaborated: “If a man were placed on his back with his hands and feet outspread, and the point of a compass put on his navel, both his fingers and his toes would be touched by the line of the circle going around him.” This became the driving principle behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvius Man, an emblematic drawing illustrating the image of a man as the measure of all things.

The work entitled Saturn Return harks back to Vitruvius’s pantheon of Roman deities, but the artist Winner Jumalon turns the belief on its head. In the painting, Winner is representing the Renaissance ideal in the body of a contemporary man, but the figure is on the verge of tipping over. If the human body is analogous to the workings of the universe, then the artist is refuting the innate sacred geometry in men. Depicting the action of falling in sequential motions, Winner adds another layer of meaning to his painting: while the toppling figure could embody the imperfection of earthly beings relative to the omnipotent and omniscient God, the figure could also be understood as taking a blind leap of faith. Moreover, the title brings to mind the phenomenon of entropy—that we do not live in an ordered world rationalized by ratios and mathematical calculations. The cosmological reference therefore reflects the artist’s determination to understand and make sense of the dynamic forces that influence his art-making processes. This could be the artist’s investigation on mortality or even a lament of his own existence in the universe.

Pointing to the moment when Saturn returns to its original place after a twenty-nine-year cycle, the artist is perhaps alluding to a significant juncture which he has reached in the course of his personal development. Like the figure in his painting, Winner Jumalon is ready to plunge into the inevitable unknown and entrench more deeply in “the tension between symmetrical binding and asymmetrical loosening,” as put forth by the art historian Dogobert Frey.