Silja Rantanen's doctoral thesis is the first purely theoretical dissertation undertaken at the doctoral programme of the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Arts Helsinki. Instead of her significant body of work, Rantanen broadly analyses the works of other contemporary artists and forges connections between compositional patternings of modern and contemporary artworks.
Rantanen's groundbreaking research work opens up a multifaceted perspective on the meaning of composition in contemporary art. Rantanen's starting point in her study is the observation that the form of works has received negligible attention in art research for years and the significance of artistic composition is currently even being denied by stating that conceptual artworks have no formal language. As Rantanen persuasively demonstrates, the formalist theory created at the beginning of the 20th century has been found to be outmoded, but a new and more modern conception of the meaning of form in art has not grown out of this former critique. Rantanen in her study starts from the premise that the genres of contemporary art or compositional forms are still based on formal solutions even when they are said to be formless.