The Trace of the Glorious Stroke
The Rooster Gallery cordially invites you to the exhibition of works by Andrius Zakarauskas, The Trace of the Glorious Stroke, which will be open from 3rd to 27th of February in the gallery’s space at 12 Šv. Brunono Bonifaco St.
The exhibition contains the artist’s newest works – paintings and drawings. In these works, Zakarauskas continues a search for the relation of form and narrative in painting. Proceeding from religious subjects and biblical scenes, which he has been consistently exploring over the last several years, the artist offers their original visually and semantically deconstructed versions. He observes the twists of the plot, and by touching the canvas as if performs the gesture of the Doubting Apostle, St Thomas, over and over again, thus checking the reality of the depicted event in an attempt to reestablish his personal relation to it in the ever-changing daily life. In his works he explores the tension between abstraction and figurativeness, between facts and imagination, between secularity and sacrality, while classical images existing in this tension are foreseeably becoming meaningful for each upcoming day.
The key element of the series displayed in this exhibition is the basic component of painting – a stroke, which the painter keeps celebrating, ritually laying and repeating every day. Paintings become collections of strokes, their agglomerates of sorts. Once clustering together, once dispersing, strokes form different, almost recognizable shapes. Images are constructed by disassembling and reassembling them several times, as if in search of the most perfect possible combination. The stages of this process are visible and emphasized, and the breaks between them are filled with air – like taking a breath while talking. The relation of warm and cold areas is juxtaposed with the movement of air masses of different barometric pressure in synoptic charts. Thus, as if making a weather forecast for tomorrow, the artist tries to foresee the ending of each event of the plot, each painting situation, and the impact of the forecast on the final image and its mood.
Radiant, almost screen-like glowing images graphically replicated by Zakarauskas and echoing on the walls of the exhibition space are sometimes absorbing and immersive, and sometimes, on the contrary, they elevate and “transport” you elsewhere. Only the motif of a hand laying paint, repeatedly emerging in the course of this dynamic ritual, brings us back to the surface of the painting, guiding our look through the chart of personal and painting experiences, and reiterating: wave me left and wave me right, and wave me over my face.
This exhibition is a part of new project “SU-MENĖK” by Vilnius City Municipality.
www.sumenek.lt