In 1947 the advertising agency N. W. Ayer coined a line for De Beers: “A diamond is forever.” Within a generation it had stopped sounding like a slogan and started sounding like a fact. Ian Fleming’s novel and the later Bond film absorbed it into popular myth, and the phrase now names a belief so widely shared that its origin in marketing is easily forgotten. At Zetterberg Gallery Diamonds Are Forever takes this phrase as an object of analysis. What do we mean when we call something lasting, and who benefits from our believing it?
Here the diamond becomes a productive lens as it condenses several systems of belief at once. Its value rests on manufactured scarcity, a condition it shares with the art market, where rarity, provenance and desire are likewise produced as much as discovered. Its physical durability contrasts with the instability of the meanings attached to it: desire, status, security. Its geological formation, carbon transformed by time and pressure, offers a model for artistic process. And its brilliance is an optical effect of surface and facet, a reminder that what we admire is often refraction rather than substance.
The recent arrival of laboratory-grown stones complicates the picture further, reopening Walter Benjamin’s question of whether aura resides in the material or in the story told about it. The four artists do not illustrate these themes. They occupy different positions in relation to them.
Jani Leinonen approaches value as a social construct. Working with the language of branding, advertising and corporate identity, he treats consumer culture as a system whose authority depends on collective participation. His strategy is one of appropriation and displacement: familiar commercial forms are relocated into the gallery, where their claims become visible as claims. With The Sheep (2026) and The Circus (2026) he activates the lens of scarcity and belief most directly, asking what separates a brand promise from a cultural truth, and whether a gallery is exempt from the same logic.
Erwin Laiho shifts attention from the circulation of value to the making of the image. In relation to the diamond, 1 (MOOP: Matter Out of Place) Enough Disk Space (Astro Laser) (2025) engages the lens of surface and facet: brilliance understood as something produced through material decisions and made legible to the viewer through looking. Where Leinonen exposes the system, Laiho examines the perceptual mechanism on which the system depends.
Mari Keto introduces the human and bodily register that a discussion of commodities tends to omit. Her latest works Bountiful and Fallen I & II engage the tension between permanence and impermanence: if the diamond promises endurance, the figure, the moment and the feeling remain subject to change. Keto gives the exhibition its emotional stakes, since the promise of “forever” is most consequential where it is applied to human relations.
Riikka Hyvönen approaches the theme through form and duration. Allegedly, on the Spectrum (2025) most clearly activates the lens of pressure and transformation, treating making as a process in which time and force leave visible traces. In contrast to the diamond’s mythic fixity, her practice suggests that permanence, where it exists, is the outcome of change rather than its opposite.
Read together, the four practices agree on a suspicion of glamour but diverge on what should follow from it. Leinonen’s critique and Keto’s tenderness pull in different directions, as do Laiho’s attention to effect and Hyvönen’s attention to process. The exhibition does not resolve these differences. It stages them, and in doing so it declines the single, seamless narrative that the diamond myth itself depends upon.
The viewer is invited to consider the conditions of the display alongside the works themselves, and to recognise that the gallery, too, is a place where belief is organised and value is made.
The title is therefore a question rather than a statement. Permanence emerges here as a claim, a desire and a negotiation, sustained by stories, markets and habits of looking, and not as a property of any material. In the presence of these works, the viewer is placed in the position of the one who decides what “forever” is worth.
Text by Dr. Aura Seikkula
