Eeli Aalto

Eeli Alvar Aalto (born 6 February 1931 in Viipuri, Finland, present-day Vyborg, Russia) is a Finnish visual artist and television director.

Youth During the Winter War, Eeli Aalto and his parents fled the war to the Pohjois-Pohjanmaa region, first to Liminka and then to Oulu. Eeli Aalto became acquainted with art at the age of 10 when he saw paintings by the Liminka-based artist Vilho Lampi. He painted landscapes and city scenarios. In the 1960s Aalto also experimented in abstract art. Eeli Aalto used his realistic pictures to show that figurative art had never disappeared anywhere. According to Giorgio Morandi "nothing is as abstract as reality".

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union Eeli Aalto travelled to his home city of Vyborg in 1991. He said that seeing the city after half a century first felt like descending to a nightmare. "I felt a foreigner, but so did the Russian inhabitants." Eeli Aalto made a documentary film Wiipurini (1992) based on his trip to Vyborg.

Television essayist Jukka Lindfors describes Eeli Aalto's films as personal statements, a kind of television essays or pontifications. "They are often poetic and nostalgic, but they also have quite a lot of fresh humour, acridity and black satire."

According to Lindfors Eeli Aalto's artist documents give away an air of understanding reaching beyond the surface, and each subject is also reflected in the filming and editing of the films. His subjects have often been peculiar marginal characters, creative outsiders. Aalto often also appears in his films himself, sometimes as a fictive character.

Literature and other works Aalto has written two books about artists, of which one is about Vilho Lampi (1969) and the other about Reidar Särestöniemi (1976).

From 1983 to 1988 Eeli Aalto wrote columns in the newspaper Kaleva under the title "Pienet filosofiat". Aalto wrote about four hundred columns and also illustrated them. Aalto was the only member of the audience who watched the act in its entirety and took photographs, which were later used as evidence in a trial against the actors. In February 2009 Aalto published photographs of the act on the Internet, which had never been shown before.

Private life Aalto lives in Kempele. Aalto's son Simo Aalto is known as a magician, Aalto's grandchildren Saara and Suvi Aalto are singers and Sari Aalto is a ventriloquist.

Awards and recognition Eeli Aalto was awarded an artist's pension in 1994.

In 2012 Aalto was awarded the Kultainen kaulin ("Golden rolling pin") award for a culturally significant Oulu citizen.