Just when I finished the pink monochromes, Florian asked if I could show my fresh Manner wafer work at Collector Agenda's new project space in Vienna in a couple of weeks. I love reacting fast and furious, so I accepted the challenge and booked the flights immediately.

I had never heard of Manner - the iconic Austrian wafer since 1890 - before January, when my Austrian friend Simeon told about the company's personalization campaign - the consumers could replace the brand with their own names.

Manner had a list of acceptable names, so it was not possible to write there Mother of All Car Bombs or Mustard Gas Wafer Dreams. In addition, the list looked very Germanic. No Chinese, Arabic, African or Spanish names. Was this traditional product not for immigrants? I asked Simeon to phone to the customer service and ask them to make Arabic names. Maybe they understood that if they don't do them, they will be labeled as racists in public. My work is titled My Austrian Friends and dedicated to all immigrants in Europe.

Manner is Arnold Schwarzenegger's favorite snack and it appears in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Mr. Schwarzenegger is a successfully integrated Austrian immigrant in California and I'm sure that he'd love my work.

The beauteous pink I would not slight.

Goethe  

Rosa in Spanish is pink but also the red color of the rose. The meaning of the word is wider than pink. For my forty pink monochrome paintings I bought some paints that were labelled as rosa in Spanish and rose in English. Indeed they weren't pink but red, useless for my project. In English pink refers to a totally different flower, dianthus.

In Japanese pink can be sakura-iro (cherry blossoms) or momo-iro (peach blossoms) but in the contemporary kawaii Japan the word pinku is more common. Hello Kitty universe is definitely super pinku.

In my mother tongue Finnish there is no word for pink, it's called vaaleanpunainen - light red - but like in Japanese, the borrowed word pinkki is used referring to the cute and the feminine pink things.

Why light red (pink) has its own word in English but light blue is just light blue? Is it because pink has so many more cultural meanings? What is the power of pink beyond sakura? Pink is not exclusively related to things considered traditionally powerless like childhood, femininity, homosexuality, softness and tenderness - there are some interesting exceptions like the British Empire (colored pink on maps) and the maglia rosa, pink jersey the leader of Giro d'Italia wears.

Painting monochromes this time pinks, is not as easy as somebody could think, at least with the rules I've set for myself. I don't mix colors, it would be too easy and depend too much of my limited creativity and sense of aesthetics. I want to show the world in a realist way so I use only existing tones mixed by industrial paint producers. Anything goes (if it's water based): fine art acrylics, enamel for furniture, paint for walls. I start a monochrome project by buying paint in fine art stores and hardware stores, I search the internet and drive to Madrid. Meanwhile I read about the color I've chosen, its cultural meanings in the society and the history, from politics to sports and from art to sex. The amount of the physical works is also big, I hire a carpenter to make the wooden structures for the paintings but I fix myself the canvases and of course paint the colors and text the titles. It's highly conceptual but very hand made art.

According to the Apocalypse, Armageddon is the location of a gathering of armies for a battle during the end times. It can also refer to any end of the world scenario.

You can’t have the cake and use it for pieing authorities. Now I’m older and I prefer to eat the cake at home. Even if I had an invitation to all these openings and money to spend for traveling, I wouldn’t go. Both the art world and the art bore me. I think I’ve seen enough art and now I prefer making it. And I prefer Sunday family lunches to art parties. However, I wish that Documenta is not destroyed in Artmageddon - I hope that my work will be included in 2022.