Eglė Ulčickaitė
ANEKDOTA
2 March – 31 March, 2023
Opening reception: 2 March, THU, 6 pm.
Pamėnkalnio Gallery (1 Pamėnkalnio St., Vilnius)
When words are written in Italics, they give courage to admit that the idea for an exhibition may arise from the painter’s state of inability.
Long absence of painting.
Yearning for the desire to paint.
Painting when you long for it. Otherwise, you won’t keep silent.
What, if painting has always been quiet?
It fell quiet.
But how, if only words are empty?
They were emptied. It’s not that the image-shells were emptied, but words have been exhausted.
When did painting turn into the image of a word? When did it look at its own reflection in the pond?
There is so much to ask. That’s where it all stops.
Endless marvellous motifs for painting. How incredibly beautiful they are. But why paint them?
Such swooning colour relationships. Such nuances between the warm and the cool tones. What does painting have to do with it?
Painting teaches us to see.
Sometimes it’s frightening that it taught me to faint like this in the autumn meadow. What a relationship between the colour of the sky and that dead grass.
I fall quiet.
I looked for those motifs that oppose representation. Those that resist painting.
To have a reason not to paint.
Nobody is talking about it. No painter will honestly admit to avoiding painting.
Anekdota [a – non + ekdidonai – to publish] is a Greek word meaning “unpublished”. It is also a secret, private story, not intended or suitable for public sharing. The term is chosen not so much to describe the concept of the exhibition, but rather as a key to access the motifs reflected through the medium of painting and painter’s relationship to socio-cultural processes. The prevailing informational and visual noise, which produces itself and forces us to keep nothing for ourselves, to give everything to the general flow, causes a kind of Inability to experience, to endure. It provokes an unwillingness to be able to. However, it is not even the incapacity of consciousness to endure or to experience the outside world that is emphasised here. The emptiness that opens up with a pause is quickly masked by the new prostheses of experience. Therefore the things themselves, the images, although being endlessly and infinitely reproduced, paradoxically still remain concealed, unknowable. Or, at best, they only open up and mark a void that, like a secret story, cannot be made public. And they don’t want to. They fail to.
Organiser: Pamėnkalnio Gallery.
Sponsors: Lithuanian Council for Culture, Lithuanian Artists’ Association.
Partners: Meno Parkas Gallery.