Articles

INCANTORY PAINTING (Nijolė Adomonytė, art critic)

The experience of pre-experience (Agnė Narušytė, art critic)

CULTURE’S SIGNS IN SPACE (Nijolė Tumėnienė, doctor of art research)

SOUND AND VISION INSTALLATION “THE RED BOOK””
(Algis Uždavinys, PhD, art critic )

SOUND AND VISION INSTALLATION “THE FOUR STYLES OF LIFE”
(Algis Uždavinys, PhD, art critic)

Algis Uždavinys, PhD, art critic

INCANTORY PAINTING
Nijolė Adomonytė, art critic

MEANINGS: The Egyptian experience is probably not unfamiliar to Gutauskas’s paintings. Its signs are sometimes within the structure of visual creations, but they are not sufficiently clear to become a pretext for forceful comparisons. From one perspective, it appears that he paints visions, which bring closer the vocabulary of Egypt’s creations. Look at The Book of the Dead where words soaked with secret meanings glide in symbolic darkness. What are their meanings? It is not worth guessing even if we solved the riddles, pieced the puzzles, it would be a worthless combination of sound. These texts do not humiliate the reader, do not push him into the unenlightened range, just open up other possibilities for the word. Text which conveys information is earth born, while secretive, unintelligible words and inconceivable phrases – can bewitch, become a prayer, a spell, a curse. Gutauskas’s paintings are like that: saturated with meanings but hidden – not informative, but bewitching meanings.
Shapes molded from symbols are viewed in his canvases. In his assemblage of forms from sundry nations we meet two types of symbols: universal and personal. Pagan and Christian symbols, archetypes, pictographs, zoomorphic and biomorphic forms, forgotten, no longer identifiable signs and easily recognizable characters represent the former. Attributed to the latter group, are the artist’s own creations and details, which can be surmised to be simply ornamental fillers. These signs usually give forth no information unless they create associations.
Neither cultural heritage, nor neologisms are explicated in the picture. They’re not forced to speak. Rather, they’re used as magical raw material. The desire to outwit the creator and read the creation’s text always encounters a fiasco. The more signs you recognize, the more incomprehensible becomes the plot as a whole. Within the heterogeneous structure of the creation, not a single form is repeated, thus an inadequacy of meanings inflates into nine possibilities. Besides, it’s not difficult to portent that the contacts established between the signs destroy their original meaning.
Indifference to singular symbols is instigated by their infrequent release into freedom – more often than not, they land in some organism’s greedy composition and become subordinate to its performance ritual. The appearance is that the painter himself is using symbols irrationally and is not taking it to heart that the work is not informative (in this case it would be more appropriate to say –the work is overly informative). Meanings are sacrificed so that the creation would imbibe incantory powers.
Of course it could be said in another way: the artist is rendering harmless the iconographic nature of the symbols, that no preconceived notions hinder the viewing of the painting.
One could guess that Gutauskas’s contemporary plasticity stimulates two circumstances – the aforementioned solidarity with his personal multitongued symbols and with the desire to break from traditional, canonized painting. Both moments stimulate a game without rules, paintings with no prognosis, difficult to motivate, submissive only to the logical development of plasticity. So shining bodies can be compared with matte, decorative scenes – with lethargic motions of a brush; next to spirals with an attitude lies a bramble-bush of unruly strokes; next to historical citations – infantile drawings held captive by experience. The rebellious nature of the paintings is also revealed by an artist who while manipulating symbols rarely draws their archetypal forms. The sacral colors are frequently exchanged with dominating synthetic colors. Maybe that’s how it should be when the desire is to cast a spell on the users of synthetic products. . .
Gutauskas’s paintings, as should be in postmodern art – is chock-full of paradoxes. Let’s not rush into becoming comfortable with them. This neosymbolist reveals himself unwillingly, thus engaging us with a long-term connection.

The experience of pre-experience
Agnė Narušytė, art critic

“All adults were children in the beginning. (Only few remember this.)”, - said Antoine de Saint Exupery during his “visit” to the exhibition of Tadas Gutauskas and Kipras Mašanauskas.
This quotation came to my mind when Tadas Gutauskas mentioned that he was interested in a “pre-experienced thinking”. This could be imagined as a flow of certain speechless thoughts emerging from yet unarticulated consciousness. For there would be no language in the consciousness without experience. An analogy to such a thinking is easy to imagine - it would be a child’s thinking when strata of experience do not press against his eyes. But how and what is it possible to think about before experience? And how much is it possible to get through experience without experiencing amnesia, which would delete all psychic information collected from the first glance cast into the environment? Maybe this painting is that glance? These questions are not only provoked by the author’s interview. They arise immediately when one enters the white space of the exhibition, which functions as an installation of unidentified objects “generating” their music. Thus the viewer is also involved into an experience, the novelty of which in a way returns him/her into a situation of the “not yet experienced”.
The return to the beginning of the formation of consciousness manifests itself in the external “childishness” of painting. Bright colour combinations and the weightlessness of forms in the white space without any indications of a three-dimensional world remind of children’s drawings. But after a moment there appears something that denies the “preexperienced thinking”. The seemingly absurd figures consist of recognisable elements: flowers, crosses, parts of a house. Hence these figures are not nameless forms which would manifest for an inexperienced glance in total unfamiliarity, but rather configurations, consisting of the elements seen before and already familiar.
However the relationships between the elements are illogical, unfamiliar. Familiar things join into useless and purposeless combinations. They do not belong to this culture and the world of handy tools, where everything exists only because it has a function. Thus the usefulness of things is not yet formed. This is a beginning when all forms and all uses of things are still possible.
Later it comes out that the composite figures made of colour blocks and recognised elements are also “experienced”, though many of them are not named in familiar concepts or could be attributed to a naive imagination. Their virtual (and amorphous) abstractness carefully conceals “things” which have archetypal meanings. The recognition of such things, like an axe, an eye, is postponed. Information has to be deciphered. Nevertheless, a deciphered text is never understood properly - there is always a doubt, whether there was an axe or an eye, or maybe there is something else encoded?
After revealing the names of the figures it is possible to read their meanings (such as “a piercing eye”, “an evil eye”, “a seductive eye”, “an all seeing eye”, “a poisonous eye” etc.). But the meaning is never defined - an eye, for instance, is always placed in an ambiguous surroundings of colour planes and other elements. Its aggressiveness or activity is always tampered with soft colour and closed into a larger form. Thus an eye really does not have a prescribed meaning. The signifying function is still latent - waiting for any experience. From this point of view the figures Tadas has painted are still “raw” matter of perception. However the postponement of conclusion is a rational (non childish) act, which gives time to enjoy and get “hooked” (only because Shecherezada knew how to do it, she kept her listeners’ attention for thousand and one night... and survived).
On the other hand, it comes out that the orgy of colours which has blinded the viewer in the beginning is made of precisely selected combinations. The brightness of colours is open, but it is also tamed by the neutralising adjacent colours. The combination of colours turns every figure into a closed unit. The white space of paintings and the one of the exhibition becomes fourdimensional when it is filled with musical harmony, which intervenes with painting. Here the sounds of an experienced nature are arranged into unusual combinations. In other words, the visual and musical harmony filling the space of the exhibition has not appeared by accident, by playing somehow unconsciously, but was created by an experienced consciousness.
Therefore, neither composition nor colours or forms could be attributed to a naive inexperience. The “preexperienced thinking” could be found in the work, which covers not the surface of canvas, but the making of the paintings themselves. It points to the author. Experience has two sides to it. It gives the “know how” and knowledge, but it can also suppress. Experiences of failures do not allow to repeat the same, and “the same” often means: to experiment, to do something for the first time, to walk on a tiny bridge over an abyss, to say what is true to you without paying attention to others’ opinions. After understanding the doubleness of experience, the meaning of the “pre-experienced thinking” becomes clearer. On the one hand, what is painted (and recorded on the tape) is not yet named. The object of experience is not yet formed. This means - it is not yet experienced. Only the process of its forming and naming which takes place in the viewer’s consciousness becomes experience. On the other hand, while watching the newest Tadas’ works and listening to Kipras’ music, it is possible to notice that another - discouraging and hampering - experience has gone away. Just to allow the viewer to experience the first flash of light.

CULTURE’S SIGNS IN SPACE
Nijolė Tumėnienė, doctor of art research

The novelty of T. Gutauskas’s sculpture is especially evident within the context of Lithuania’s sculptors. In Lithuania, the plethora of 20th century sculpture went one way only – it poetized its bulk, searched for a distinct language for the form itself, and only rarely allowed the active power of space to enter the sculpture and then only to a set limit, preserving the sculpture’s mass of physical matter, its ponderous weight, its dense and evenly textured surface (for example, V. Vildžiūnas’s sculptures with their plasticity and game with perforations). During the last decade of the last century, some young sculptors having had the opportunity to get better acquainted with the creative works of Giacometti, H. Moore, Calder, and Lehlembruck, began tolerating the opposing direction – searching for spacious forms. But this was a rare case because the majority went down the road of creating objects. T. Gutauskas’s work parts company within this context for he seeks to legitimize the rationale for this kind of sculpture where form in sundry ways opposes the active expanse of space.A new point of view towards scupture itself begins to form, embodying new relationships between space and mass which can be discussed as an airy form born betwixt a dramatic battle between light and form. In this sense, T. Gutauskas’s rather small, crested figurines of people are meaningful in that they change our traditional way of thinking about sculpture.

SOUND AND VISION INSTALLATION
“THE RED BOOK”
Algis Uždavinys, PhD, art critic

A book as an all-embracing archetype of being is the fundamental axis of Judeo - Christian civilization surrounded by symmetric and asymmetric spirals of meaning. The metaphor of the world as an easily readable or as an enciphered text is an integral part of this tradition, so it is not surprising that the “eschatology of nature” also has its own Red Book. In other words, the card indexes on nativity and extinction demonstrate need to classify the living and the dead: Eros is superseded by a desire for order and cognition, against which art can only offer disorder and erosion.
Tadas Gutauskas’ project The Red Book has several hermeneutic levels. On one side, this is a diagnosis of complicated relationships between man and nature, and on the other - a play with empirical forms of existence, which turn into a bizarre museum of fossils. However, inside every play, according to Hans Georg Gadamer, a particular structure is hidden, and every formal structure is also a play of mind and senses. The living creatures and plants cast in bronze, copper or silver become mummies of an artistic laboratory, the authentic relics of the sciences of botany and zoology imprisoned in geometrically shaped “sarcophagi”. Every exhibit is an exact copy of its prototype. The copy can be reproduced, but the prototype is far from being transcendental: the former belongs to the same “machine of the world” (machina mundana) discovered in the XVI th century by science, which placed nature in opposition to the culture of artefacts. At that very time, after denial of the unity of the sacred cosmos founded on sympathetic relations, the world of nature disclosed as a neutral object open for investigation or transformation into an exotic collection of samples.
While creating an aesthetic and natural “iconostasis” Tadas Gutauskas is less interested in a positivist analysis than in ironic implications and a wish to emphasize the importance of an ecological idea. For that reason the fish (as if taken from naturalistic reliefs of the Vth dynasty of Egypt), a lobster or a seashore plant (like a branch torn off some mythological tree) - all “buried” under the glass - are contrasted with the collapsing architectural interior in which they are exhibited. The interior silently foretells a tragic end for the civilization which destroys nature and the nature of the human being himself. But a perfect beauty of biological forms is made more distinct against a background of ruins. This beauty must not necessarily be modified in order to reveal the literal meaning of life. The detailed reproduction of a model is not just the copying of empirical reality, but is also the cognition of its essence. Each mask reveals as well as conceals the truth: death reveals the charm of existence. An everyday picture is replaced by a patient, matter-of -fact narrative in which every exhibit is named scientifically and given a particular status in the register of the Red Book. Three fish, the roller, the lobster and the branch of the seashore plant are life-sized castings. Every detail of the original is reproduced so that the naturalistic aspect of the copy would be emphasized. The choice of material is aesthetically motivated. It helps to create a peculiar mood: the living beings exhibited seem to have come from another world, where organic forms are made of different metals. The author plays with this paradox behind which no philosophical idea is concealed, except for the aspiration to achieve an aesthetic effect in stressing accurate, I would even say, filigree aspects of a casting. Everything else is just a background, a pseudo-scientific quotation when the installation of a fictitious room of natural sciences is carried out. Kipras Mašanauskas’ music composed on the occasion of this particular exhibition and recorded in Dolby-Surround Pro-Logic system highlights the fanciful atmosphere which is within the meticulously clear structures. If in Tadas Gutauskas’ compositions the accent is on construction and the need for precise measurement, while the aspect of infinity is somewhat denied, the music compensates for the irrational sense of endlessness and gives the project added weight.
Tadas Gutauskas’ attempt to make the castings precise, in other words, to copy the forms of some animals and plants, only partly can be defined as naturalism or natural realism. It is rather a postmodern “quoting” of forms when scientific rationality is seemingly moved to the irrational context in which the exhibits mentioned above become the elements of some odd mystery play. Musical vibrations imply that space only seems to be stable. It is subordinate to the flow of time. This idea is attested by the choice of interior, which is the opposite of a sterile “death mask”. On the other hand, the casting only pretends to be a “mask”: a precisely replicated material simulacrum is a technologically created chimera, something like the Prague rabbis’ golem, which could be inspired only by an ailing imagination. Kipras Mašanauskas’ unconventional music presented in compact disc form stirs our imagination about the power of reproduction through which spontaneity can be controlled. The ritual can be repeated endlessly; the space of the exhibition can even be replenished with new works of the same kind. Nothing would change essentially. The eclecticism of postmodernism is open to all kinds of possibilities and the most unexpected twists, which can easily be presented in a very serious manner. The mimetic character of Tadas Gutauskas’ castings and the allusion to the aesthetics of “museum stands” are obviously unique in the context of contemporary Lithuanian art, but the principles of the play that he bases himself on are a component of Western postmodern aesthetics.

SOUND AND VISION INSTALLATION
“THE FOUR STYLES OF LIFE”
Algis Uždavinys, PhD, art critic

The four styles of life are like four elements, the four seasons, and the four directions. But the artist transforms this rational scheme into the highly creative pattern.

“Life: to grow”. The golden seed is put into the stone vessel like into the womb of the goddess-mother or nature. The seed is nothing but the treasury of the different potencies before their manifestation. “Life: to fly”. The fly is understood not in a literal sense but as a possibility to ascend and to fall. The scales of spoons are able to represent this ephemeral balance: two eggs symbolize two different kinds of possibilities, light and darkness. But the whole plot is governed by the destiny which is unpredictable.
“Life: to love”. The human heart and the stone niche show the presence of life and death: both of them are united by the invisible power of love. To love – it means to surrender the rhythms of being which turn our body into the mummy of glass. The time itself is turned into the stone of eternity.
“Life: to intoxicate”. The intoxication is inseparable both from the ascent to heaven and the descent to hell. Its crazy power transcends the borders of good and evil, since the mouth of Infinity swallows up everything and only a sort of pseudo-ritualistic play with certain signs of destiny is left for us who create a so-called work of art.

Algis Uždavinys, PhD, art critic

The glory of this world is ephemeral. “The Triumph Arch” both paradoxically and ironically reveals this truth. We see concret and iron instead of marble, a sort of ruins instead of certain solemn rites, and defeat instead of victory.
At first sight the idea of vault refers to an ancient mythology, but here it becomes a sort of creative disgrace. The tree is real, and the iron vault is man-made. Their combination and opposition create the illusion of terrifying mirage. Every tree can symbolize the cosmic axis, however, the ring of iron represents the realm of modern technology which is able to corrupt the harmony of virgin nature.
The mythical column which connects the heaven and earth could be imagined not only as a chimney of crematorium but also as the gigantic phallos. The four thorny rings are made red and this colour symbolizes blood and passion. This tower of the blind power and illusion is a sort of minaret of the Post-modern “religion” in the most ironic sense.