2.15 – 3.29.2025
Maija Luutonen
Cream Sand
NOON Projects is honored to present Cream Sand, Maija Luutonen’s first solo exhibition in the United States. This new body of work marks a return to canvas and linen after two decades of working primarily with paper, expanding her ongoing exploration of materiality, surface, and the ephemeral nature of perception. Cream Sand reflects on the body and its surroundings—both the physicality of what is seen and the intimate sensations of textiles, garments, and objects against the skin. The exhibition’s title stems from a misreading of a Japanese sandwich wrapper labeled “Cream Sando,” a phrase that, when misinterpreted, conjures images of muted tones and textures, a blending of cream and sand into a mysterious substance. This interplay of language, material, and sensory experience runs throughout Luutonen’s work, as she builds compositions that hover between drawing and painting, precision and fluidity, presence and absence.
Over the past 20 years, Luutonen has developed a distinctive practice rooted in painting, drawing, and installation. She is best known for her large-scale paintings on paper, where airbrushed pigment and layered surfaces create a delicate balance between flatness and depth. In her installations, these works often extend beyond the two-dimensional plane, incorporating sculptural elements that activate the surrounding space.
With Cream Sand, Luutonen embraces the shift from paper to textiles and canvas, reconnecting with these materials through a process of exploration and rediscovery. This transition has led to works that are at once minimal and textural, maintaining the immediacy of drawing while engaging with the depth and weight of textiles. She treats canvas as a living surface, allowing its fibers to shape and influence her compositions. Muted tones and layered marks evoke impressions of hair, lace, pinstripes, and the subtle imprints left by garments on skin. The body remains central in the works —both as an imagined presence and as a site of memory, sensation, and transformation.
Luutonen’s working process is rooted in accumulation and intuition. She gathers images, writes, sketches, categorizes, and experiments with materials, allowing ideas to emerge through repetition and variation. The resulting works resist fixed representation, instead offering glimpses of the unseen—textures felt but not always visible, forms that hover on the edge of recognition. In Cream Sand, she continues her investigation into the relationship between material and meaning, constructing a space where the act of looking is intertwined with the act of feeling.
