Pauliina Pietilä was born in 1982 and grew up in a very small town in Finland, and is now based in Löderup, Sweden. She graduated from Malmö Art Academy and is perhaps best known for her evocative paintings. Like many artists before her, she often works from photographs, but here photography is not merely a tool for documenting a subject—it is an important part of the artistic process itself.

Her paintings are created from impressions gathered during her own nocturnal walks through the city of Malmö. Pietilä looks for places that catch her eye and may serve as the seed for a painting. These might be dimly lit offices and foyers, antiquarian bookshops, flea-market shops and other places that take on an entirely different character at night. With a camera and tripod, she photographs the subjects that arouse her interest. She often returns to the same place several times, both to take more photographs and to find precisely the light she is seeking.

“I photograph at night because I feel very comfortable doing so. It is pleasant to be alone, and to be almost invisible when looking in on other people’s lives. The feeling that I perhaps do not really have permission to do so, when I am showing other people’s lives, gives me a thrill. That it is a little like an intrusion.”

The photographs are then digitally processed and manipulated to create a basis for the painting. Pietilä is careful to ensure that the photograph remains merely a point of departure; the final painting emerges and takes shape on the canvas.

It is also this very sense of looking in that makes Pietilä’s subjects so fascinating. They can be likened to theatrical scenes from which the actors have just departed. We find ourselves outside, observing a world that is not really intended for us. At times, a faint reflection appears in a pane of glass, as if to remind us of our own presence.

In the present painting, “Ingång”, it is the entrance to an office complex that has caught her eye. It is night. The street is deserted and the place feels lonely and stripped back. The green plants are doubled across the canvas and the sterile entrance. Yet on the other side of the street, a warm light can be glimpsed, radiating wistfully from a pair of windows. Perhaps it is precisely there, in the contrast between darkness and warm light, between the public and the private, that the painting begins to tell its story.