‘Do not disturb our paintings…’

When I was eleven years old, my father gave me a copy of the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. It was enormous – A4 in format, or thereabouts, with a spine at least three inches wide. And it was stuffed with illustrations which, perhaps inevitably at that age, guided my reading. What seized my attention was the imagery inside the Finno-Ugric section – it was almost manic in its intensity – making it both spellbinding and alienating. It was a very self-contained visual universe that was the work of a single artist active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Axel (Akseli in Finnish) Gallen-Kallela.

In May of this year, I was given the chance to travel to Finland on a courtesy visit, having written the catalogue essay for an exhibition of work by Keith Tyson, the British artist who started off as a welder in the Liverpool docks, went to art school, and walked away with the Turner Prize at the age of thirty-three. Keith is a punk Leonardo in overdrive – by which I mean he is a conceptual artist who works in any and every medium, and in every register – on scale, and with a versatility, of production that is simply astonishing. No other contemporary oeuvre has the same range, complexity and intellectual ambition.

The venue for the exhibition was the Serlachius Museum in Manttaa, which is several hours north of Helsinki in what feels like the middle of the Finnish wilderness. Keith’s show was in the modern, state-of-the-art exhibition hall, perched right on the edge of ...