Tarmo Paunu is obsessed with the human being, the human face, the human condition, the depiction of tensions and the inner self. His expression is tied to the living image of the human being. The artist's subject is the human being and his role is to present his work in front of people, as in ancient Greek theatre. Paunu's painting and thinking is human-oriented, human-centred and humane. In 2022, isn't this a bit nauseating? One begins to fear being infected by some old plague. The victorious artificial life is already elsewhere. In the century of transhumanism, Paunu's art is threatened by a creeping obsolescence. The chorus, the people and the audience on Paunu's stage are ageing and disappearing, melting away before his eyes. The artist feels as if the last ones are leaving.

Reality is being bid with gleeful visions of hell and perdition, while a sideways movement is used to enter the paradise of technology, in which threat of expulsion replaces death as the subject of existential fear. When the virtual is more real than the real, the reality that the painter cherishes will be seen as escapism. What the artist drew from and roiled is secondary to the children of paradise and is forgotten like the human-faced gods of the pagan world. In the new system, whose face no one wants to look at, the creator of virtual money makes everyone compete with everyone else for all the same things in a panopticon. The deliberately created mimesis of desires, an instrument of collective control, leads to an unprecedented sacrificial crisis, as was foreseen at the end of the 20th century. The scapegoats trapped and caught by the controlling spirit of neo-moralism, carrying away the shame of our common mediocrity, are banished from the sheep pen into the abyss.

On the virtually expanded field of painting, each player engages in a simulation of his or her choice, which the hidden machinery calls "polyphonic richness". Through the noise of the planned uproars and controversies programmed into the system, one cannot discern messages about the actual movements of the war and money machine, the concentration of hidden power as it prepares for the final decisive blow. Against all this, the game of the artist – who is currently lifted up, but replaceable – becomes muddled. The frame begins to be visible as one is forced to look at oneself in the mirror, behind which the users of invisible money are sovereign, regulating thinking and things. Unlike the social aspirations of the last century, the safety net to which the artist remains tied to is conditional. To live from it and by it is requires passing obedience training, giving one's soul and body to those who control life.

The output of Tarmo Paunu's work became visibly darker after his externally greatest success, the solo exhibition at Helsinki Art Hall (2013) and the one at Kunstihoone in Tallinn (2014) that sprung from it. Paunu's paintings started to become a series of recurring images of male faces caught up in a state of malaise. The background scenes sank out of sight and the female figures disappeared around the men in his later solo exhibitions Viaporin kasvot ("The Faces of Sveaborg", Galleria Rantakasarmi, Helsinki, 2015) and Oudot kasvot ("Strange Face", Rankka-galleria, Helsinki, 2016). Viewers may have wondered what had happened in Paunu's visual world and whether the series of paintings were perhaps implicit self-portraits. The question arose: has the painter become a cabin dweller who no longer has the energy to try, is he serious about painting anymore, or has he started to hate his medium – does he even want to push the whole field down to the bottom?

The upwardly mobile career having climbed into the wilderness of middle age, which is only a small part of the wider desert of the 21st century, the next steps in that career would require moves that the soul will not bend to without splitting (see the painting Two-Face). On the other hand, crises of misfit can be redemptive. Methodologically, Paunu has always dared to fail when necessary. However, the energy of self-punishment, even if it stems from a critique of naivety and pride, often threatens in contemporary art to become the basic mode of working, which only results in demented repetition of same images and emotions, a false serialism, which in itself is yet suitable for use and consumption, but in which the personality of the author has disappeared. There is still a "what", but no longer a "who".

The awakening from hypnotic sleep, the anamnesis of the person and the recuperation of energy begins when the compulsory nausea prescribed for all has been suffered long enough and has been recognised as a mannerism. And because it has been identified as a cliché, it is revealed that its use value is in fact crowd control, invalidisation. Tarmo, "energy" in Finnish and the energy of the artist, is recharged by a return to former strengths. In his own words, Tarmo does not compete with anyone but himself and does not want to invent anything new, but only to do better what he does by nature, which in itself is a sufficient challenge. From the depression, which has been entered in sameness, each person can only straighten out through his or her own separate path.

The escapees on the walls of Studio Là-bas→ are no longer stuck in a fog, but wander in a scent that is returning to the odourless and tasteless hall of mirrors. On the other hand, that scent has again misled the men and women depicted in the paintings to the garden of their idealisations of femininity. This is not a new Eden but something waiting to be washed by the deluge. The painter and the viewer would like to believe in equality, but cannot, because they are unable to see it. The escape into softness turns into gloom, going through a new stone age and a medieval period, and awakens to a fresh reality that tastes of gravel and iron which was hidden from everyone all along. Suddenly we are in the middle of a very metallic world, waiting at the city gate for the rescuing barbarians, all being anxious about the precise starting hour of the war. The situation becomes humorous once everyone realises how it has come to this and what this is all about.