There are spires whose horizontal lines sit like doors to a storm shelter buffering time. The canyon labyrinths stand reëxposed, lined with shards of pottery, and past vegetation begins a new life on the banks of a once-submerged shore. The delineation of the past directs our gaze as we zoom past, travelling by motorboat at a rapid speed. Corridors rest on far vistas, as our perspective opens to new landscapes—caught in a system of humankind’s creation. These recent avenues of civilization are built by the effacement of ever-changing landscapes.
In images of people wading through masses of water, there are elements characterising the severity of the situation. These submerged elements are foreign to the expressions inhabiting the faces of the individuals traversing their way through the murk. Telephone posts, electrical lines, windows and entrances to buildings become the measurements of the unseen. Beneath this surface, there lay an accumulation of industry and societal sentiment that can articulate a past, which has been reawakened by contemporaneous events. It creates an admixture that we find ourselves absorbed by. In taking a vial of this substance we would be exposed to a scene of excretion that contains a multitudinal purview of histories that can be both alien and unmistakably linked to our present.
Somewhere here, amongst the waste, we might begin our reflection of these paintings with their carefully crafted surfaces filled with lines, planes, and draped forms. Paintings that occupy the same space of another’s hand. Thoughts subscribed to a surface meant to be transported. And a relationship made from conversations, from words, and from pictures, where we try to commune in a shared understanding of a device. These paintings contain components more than compositions. Conjectures of space with uncertain depths that combine with pulsating rhythms that punctuate the surfaces, offering us both a breath to rest our thoughts and boulevards of repulsion. The planes of the surfaces are careless to the workings of the natural order, more attuned to a galactic order of repeating and overlapping cadences.
Let’s conceive the paintings as occupying a continuance assembled from a hydrology of our present, splashed with the ripples of the anthropogenic development edifice, where we may be reminded of our position as viewers, conveying our attitudes to artistry. We stand in a vertical position, we lay in the horizontal, and while sitting, perhaps our most contemplative position, we locate ourselves seventy-five percent in the vertical and twenty-five percent in the horizontal. It is here that I find these paintings, two viewers, two provocateurs, in union contemplating material. A series of elements superseding any defined compositional rationale.
Nicholas Matranga
Vika Prokopaviciute (b. 1983) is a painter living and working in Vienna, AT. Her practice is concerned with the representation of abstraction.
Nicholas Matranga (b. 1983) is an artist. On occasions he writes.
TRUST is an artist-run space in Vienna, AT
Very Accessible Painting
Vika Prokopaviciute
October 28–30, 2022
TRUST, Vienna, AT
Photography: kunst-dokumentation.com
Vika Prokopaviciute, Very Accessible Painting, 2022, exhibition view, TRUST, Vienna, AT
Vika Prokopaviciute, Very Accessible Painting, 2022, exhibition view, TRUST, Vienna, AT
Vika Prokopaviciute, Very Accessible Painting, 2022, exhibition view, TRUST, Vienna, AT
Vika Prokopaviciute, OPEN, 200 x 130 cm, oil and acrylic on linen, 2022
Vika Prokopaviciute, OPEN, 2022 (detail)
Vika Prokopaviciute, OPEN, 2022 (detail)
Vika Prokopaviciute, QUIET MONTH OF MARCH, 200 x 130 cm, oil and acrylic on linen, 2022
Vika Prokopaviciute, QUIET MONTH OF MARCH, 2022 (detail)
Vika Prokopaviciute, QUIET MONTH OF MARCH, 2022 (detail)
Vika Prokopaviciute, OPEN, STILL, YET, 130 x 200 cm, oil and acrylic on linen, 2022
Vika Prokopaviciute, OPEN, STILL, YET, 2022 (detail)
Vika Prokopaviciute, OPEN, STILL, YET, 2022 (detail)
Vika Prokopaviciute, A VERY ACCESSIBLE PAINTING, 130 x 200 cm, oil on linen, 2019
Vika Prokopaviciute, A VERY ACCESSIBLE PAINTING, 2019 (detail)
