Cella– Viltė Čepulytė’s debut exhibition at The Rooster Gallery

On Thursday, August 15, at 6 p.m., The Rooster Gallery (Šv. Brunono Bonifaco St. 12, Vilnius) invites you to the solo exhibition Cella by the young generation artist Viltė Čepulytė.

The gallery has established it’s own award, ‘The Rooster Gallery Open’, during the Young Painter Prize competition and organizes a solo exhibition for one of the competition’s finalists. In 2023, this award was given to Viltė Čepulytė.

How can one represent the invisible, that which appears only occasionally and uncontrollably, not to the eyes of the body but to the eyes of the mind? The artistic depiction of divinity has long been a challenge for ancient painters, poets, and philosophers. Religious consciousness most revered the archaic forms of gods, which resembled stone or wooden pillars more than beings from recognizable reality. Philosophers took an even more radical stance. Plato, for example, discusses not even a god, but a bed painted by an artist. This painted bed represents a physical bed made by a craftsman, which itself is merely the realization of an imagined bed. However, even that imagined bed, existing only in one’s mind, is merely a projection of an ideal, “otherworldly” bed. In other words, the artist’s work is two steps removed from the ultimate referent, making it far less perfect than a bed where one might nap or watch a Netflix series. So, what should an artist do? Can an artist create reality and, above all, forms that convey divine reality? This becomes easier if we concede that there may be no gods or God. Perhaps, there is no reality at all. But Viltė Čepulytė’s work is different. In her art, the divine beings of Antiquity come alive. Her medium is painting, but what does it convey? Here, the referent is not the god himself, nor even his sculpture in a museum. Instead, it is a photograph of the sculpture that is painted – a photographic image mediated by technology. The artist did not sit armed with a palette, brushes, or pencils in the “model room.” The two-dimensional photograph serves as a medium between the three-dimensional sculpture and the two-dimensional painting. In this process, with the change of the medium, the original object – the sculpture – undergoes a double transformation, or transfiguration, as the artist describes it. But where is the god, inaccessible to our sight? The greatest transformation is the transition from the invisible idea to the visible world. The other transformation is analogous: from sculpture, mediated by technology, to painting. Each of these steps strips away what we consider reality. Objects become less and less tangible, although they retain their sensuality. In the paintings, they ultimately become the ghosts of “reality” – present and absent, caught between the past and the present. They are most real in the artist’s memory, continually enriched by imagination. The very whitish-blue and black colour palette of the paintings, their paleness, and the soft rendering of hard marble testify to their ghostly nature. On the other hand, the intermittently glowing colour reminds us that these sculptures once were considered representations of holiness, cult objects, and images of the relatively invisible. The exhibition’s title, Cella, reflects the artist’s concept of the inner room of an ancient temple, where the image of the deity stands in proud solitude. The deity itself is not there, but the image of the image of that image reminds us of it and inspires us to create new stories about gods and men.

Text Vytautas Ališauskas
Graphic designer Mantas Valentukonis
Curators Ieva Morta Jankauskaitė, Kornelija Volungytė
The exhibition is part of the YPP ‚The Rooster Gallery Open‘ prize.

The Rooster Gallery’s events are kindly supported by Vilnius City Municipality and Topcolor.

Opening hours: IV-VI 4.00–7.00 p.m., VII 2.00–5.00 p.m.