The Rooster Gallery cordially invites you to a solo show by Tomas Dauksa SUMMER OF ETERNAL LOVE, which will be open from July 3 to 23 in the gallery’s exhibition space at 12 Šv. Brunono Bonifaco St. Opening hours of the gallery: IV–VI 4 p.m.–7 p.m., VII 2 p.m.–5 p.m. The exhibition opening will take place on July 3, 6 p.m.

Love,

I’m writing to You from the past, as it usually happens with letters that travel slower than our thoughts, feelings, or intentions. It may be that when you will be reading this letter we will already be someone else, or different, with others, or maybe just silent and solitary. Life is unpredictable, but it is love that works magic in it – a miraculous and intense encounter, sometimes likened to madness. It is a chemical reaction that makes us glow strangely in the dark! In the future, when You are reading this letter, You don’t know me yet, or maybe have already forgotten me, so let me remind You about inevitable beginnings and ends. Love stories eventually lose their middle, leaving several things, feelings and memories tossed in the margins and bends. Today I would like to change it – flood the deltas of days and make blood, tears and the champagne of kisses sparkle forever. Yet life has taught me a few things: first, to never promise anything, second, that there is nothing eternal, third, that your love choice means nothing if you are not chosen yourself. I confess that I often ignore these lessons, thus I still believe in everlasting love, which, I know, is at the same time fully unknowable and illogical, sacred and sacrilegious, full of quaint sadness and joy, extraordinary longing and obsessive attachment, healing and morbid. You will say that everlasting love does not exist, but I have conjured it, just like bees gather honey from weeds, people extract medicine from snake venom, and creatures at the very bottom of the ocean are able to produce light for themselves. Pure magic!

At first You said that my inside reminded you of a dark and somewhat chilly cavern full of fresh springs. Your tenderness has turned me into water. I began changing shapes, trying to learn Your innermost thoughts and feelings You didn’t know You had. Frankly, back then I did not know anything about myself either. Our desire turned the inner springs and sources into elegant fountains. Just think of it, what a beautiful metaphor of love it is, capturing direct dependance, unbroken connection, a harmonious system. Without water, these bizarre reservoirs are but incommodious vessels of solitude and boredom, while water without them is formless and lost. Only together do they create circulation and attraction. Yet I felt the itch of anxiety about the end of summer – the most favourable season for fountains, when birds bathe in them in the morning, children submerge their little sticky hands at noon, and lovers have a date in the evening. While You weren’t watching, I poured into one of the fountains some love elixir – a liquid curse of eternal love and summer, but I did not realize that in a closed system it would affect me as well. I did not know then that fountains sputter and foam not only out of love, but also because of mere pressure. It is simple physics, not magic. You know what? Loved ones are weird strangers and passers-by of our lives, who study our language and inner bodies of water, turning us into talented feeling engineers and alchemists. You are one of them.

Your love

In his newest exhibition Summer of Eternal Love, the artist Tomas Daukša unveils a fabulous installation featuring more than a dozen new sculptural objects. Continuing the artist’s series Fountains of Joy, the project showcases bizarre otherworldly fountains. The artist employs them as peculiar mechanisms that circulate liquefied themes. This time, the objects contain flowing and murmuring love elixir, which takes us back to the equally banal and paradoxical fantasy of eternal love. It accommodates the maddening irrational infatuation, an obsessive craving for the other, and the tiresome being together alike.

TOMAS DAUKŠA (b. 1988) is an artist of the young generation, who received a doctoral degree in fine arts at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2019. From 2009, he has been an active participant in group exhibitions in Lithuania and elsewhere, and has held several solo exhibitions. His works have been presented in international contemporary art fairs and important art institutions of Lithuania. In 2013, Daukša became a recipient of Ary Stillman fellowship.