DECOY. Solo show by Jonas Motiejus Meškauskas

“You can be fooled. He has placed a decoy and will lure you into a convoluted trap – tensions that will trigger you by their amplitudes like an incoherent crime story. You will get drawn into a play with more spacious contexts, more capacious discourses, and higher-status concepts: […] resurrection after the death of painting or the author, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, arte povera, rural homages to Tuymans,  photography, semiotics, becoming, perception, reality and reality, reality and fiction, reality and virtuality, fictitious reality, simulacrum, hyper-reality/fiction, artist and viewer, subject and object, local and global, perhaps even glocal, studium and punctum, theory and practice, top and bottom, form and content, critique of something else (expectation, nobility, medium, prestige, capital, society, technologies, power, centre, institution, anthropos etc.), ghosts of Georges Didi-Huberman, phenomena of Mintautas Gutauskas, eternal post- state, anachronism and déjà vu, here-there, inside-outside […]. But he will laugh at you flirting with dialectic connections and will say: ‘Admit it, and let go of everything that clings… All the filth… While rolling in mud and noise, return to purity’.

He – Jonas Motiejus Meškauskas – creates monochrome paintings on corrugated cardboard, which he brings from the street. He makes use of a chaotic, random image archive and does not try to mythologize the content by creating tensions or to ennoble materiality with the word ‘ephemeral’, to embellish everything with thoughtful quotes from unread books or by using neutral colours to give his works a sense of frozen reality, which determines the bipolarity of their form and content. He leaves it to those who are keen to look for dystopian models of reality, to create narratives, to establish dialogues, and to find the link between alienated reality and domesticated unreality, and to capture the uncertainty hovering between them. Thus, in the end, the set of static images created by him turns out to be just a decoy, offering a network of interpretive solutions – or, rather, impasses.” – Bliss 

Jonas Meškauskas (b. 1998) is a painter of the young generation. Having obtained a bachelor’s degree at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2022, he is currently continuing his master’s studies in painting. From 2018, he takes part in creative residencies, from 2020 – in group exhibitions. In 2021, he held a solo exhibition in Lukiškės Prison. In 2022, he was a finalist of the Young Painter’s Prize competition.

Exhibition curators: Bliss & Samanta

The exhibition opening will take place on February 1, at 18:00, in the gallery’s venue at 12 Šv. Brunono Bonifaco St. The exhibition will be open until February 26. The gallery’s visiting hours: Thursday to Saturday 16.00–19.00, Sunday 14.00–17.00.