The Rooster Gallery cordially invites you to visit the exhibition DECOY II by painter Jonas Meškauskas. The opening will take place on May 31, 18:00, in the attic of the abandoned Engineering Faculty of the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, J. Basanavičiaus St. 28.

The exhibition will be open until June 11. The gallery’s visiting hours are: Thursday to Saturday, 16.00–19.00, Sunday 14.00–17.00.

Discovering interesting and publicly unseen non-art spaces for exhibitions has been an important practice for The Rooster Gallery since its founding. This time the gallery invites you to meet at the new temporary exhibition space, located in the attic of the building at Basanavičius St. 28 (Vilnius). Built in 1910 as a bank, later the building housed Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (Vilnius Tech), and soon will be revived by the developer company REEFO. For now it will become a venue for solo show DECOY II by Jonas Motiejus Meškauskas. The exhibition is a part of the Vilnius Academy of Arts‘ Graduation Show.

Jonas Meškauskas’s artistic medium is monochrome painting on cardboard. He started with the theme of Moonscapes, which eventually extended into parallel sub-series: abandoned interiors, forests, Antarctica, travelling bells, etc. Based on documentation of reality, but eventually departing from it, these motifs serve as attempts to establish a dialogue between alienated reality and domesticated unreality, to capture the uncertainty hovering between them. The friability of the chosen medium – cardboard – seems to contradict the durability and prestige of the painting medium, and encourages us to question the concepts of sustainability and beauty. The emphatically anti-painterly neutrality of colour gives Meškauskas’s works a sense of frozen reality, which determines the bipolarity of their form and content – being here and there, inside and outside at the same time.

“I invite you to a sequel of the game, played by the same rules: each motif is taken out of context, dressed in a uniform of monochrome and corrugated cardboard rhythm, marked with a serial number, and hung together with other rubbish and ghosts in a not entirely logical sequence in an abandoned attic. In this network, the whole is disintegrated – only fragments of a chaotic archive are left in the narrative opening, pointing to the multiple interpretive solutions of this game, and various im-possibilities of a meaningful order or any solid answer, without guaranteeing anything. Every aspirational conclusion is just an empty shell, the ruins of interpretations, an illusion of truth, in which a desperate desire for tangible meaning still lingers. However, quite possibly, both a metal flower and a plastic Mercedes; both a prison and a pine forest; both an invisible muse and a transparent robot; both a kid and the whole family; both the essential tensions and divisions between them in a regular and erratic web – all that is only a decoy. Therefore, as I continue to lay a puzzle of traps, I invite you to play on and repeat the words of a friend: “Acknowledge and let go of all that clings… All the filth… Roll around in the mud and noise and return to purity.”“

Jonas Motiejus Meškauskas (b. 1998) is a painter of the young generation, who is about to finish his bachelor’s studies in painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts with this exhibition. From 2018, he has been taking part in creative residencies, and from 2020, in group exhibitions. In 2021, he held the first solo exhibition in Lukiškių prison 2.0. In 2022, he became a finalist of the Young Painter’s Prize ‘22. In 2023, he held his second solo exhibition at The Rooster Gallery and won the third place in the Zabolis Art Prize competition.