Nexus is the first personal exhibition of the young generation painter Šarūnas Baltrukonis. It presents the artists’ paintings and objects created in recent years, which creatively reflect our changed relationship with technology and the technological.
The change in this relationship is also the problem of the experience of the real as an objective visual reality, which forms the dialectic of reality-virtuality spread on both sides of the screen. The title of the exhibition was inspired by the questions of interconnectedness and overlapping of different spaces of social cognition (reality, digitality, virtuality) in contemporary artistic creation. “Nexus” is a reference to causal-aesthetic connections between ideas and bodies functioning in those different spaces.
In the painting of Šarūnas Baltrukonis, the spaces of reality and digitality and the bodies acting in them are connected. However, these spaces are abstracted, when only certain fragments of them become recognizable – wedges of reality or virtuality, often characterized by urban and/or cybernetic aesthetics.
The motifs in Baltrukonis’ canvases, having lost their natural “realism” or “digitality”, enter into a qualitatively new relationship that can be understood through mutual interaction. By combining motifs that are opposite in nature and searching for their aesthetic balance, the artist uses the rough, sharp, smooth or slippery surfaces of the planes as certain media containing different information about the bodies made of them. The surfaces of the works become a specific membrane, structuring the arrangement of motifs in the picture and creating their continuous interaction on both sides of the boundaries of the spaces of reality and virtuality.
In the paintings of Baltrukonis, we see clear hints of naturalness, parts of bodies of vital origin, as if they have given up the possibility of ageing, disintegrating or decaying and are floating in virtual, high-resolution landscapes. This is an opportunity to look through the eyes of an archaeologist at the genesis of technical and organic individuals as a continuous process of aesthetic individuation.
In this context, we can take into account the professional skills of the creator: perhaps we enjoy the images of Šarūnas Baltrukonis precisely because they – although empirically recognizable – are not the real thing, do we enjoy them because of the skills with which they were created? This pleasure, which comes when looking at the artist’s works, presupposes that we do not become victims of a blind mimetic illusion: we do not stop realizing that the cultural text seen in Baltrukonis’ works is just a “double” of the real, that what causes improvement is the illusionistic visual effect, the artificiality of the artificial [sic.].
However, what we perceive as artificial in reality is not necessarily unnatural in digital perception, and vice versa. The carefully thought-out strokes of Šarūnas Baltrukonis‘ paintings make the digital image on the canvas cosy and close as if leaving virtual anonymity aside. In the meantime, the viewer’s experience penetrating the depicted and visible objects, fills them with specific information.
In 2021 Š. Baltrukonis completed his bachelor’s studies in painting at the Kaunas Faculty of the Vilnius Academy of Arts. The artist’s works have been exhibited in group exhibitions, among which the Quadrennial of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association “LTQ’23: Communities”, gallery “Arka”, Vilnius; Surface Condition KKKC, Klaipėda; Another Energy, curator Andrius Zakarauskas, the Museum of Energy and Technology, Vilnius; Counterargument V, curators Vita Opolskytė-Brazdžiūnienė and Kazimieras Brazdžiūnas, gallery “Meno parkas”, Kaunas, etc.
7 September – 13 October, 2023
Drifts galerija, T. Vrublevskio str. 6-2, Vilnius
Curator – Alberta Vengrytė
Exhibition architect – Ieva Cicėnaitė
Text editing and translation – Alberta Vengrytė
Graphic design – Gasparas Zondovas
Photography: Vaida Jonušytė
