2025 February 21 - March 15 the exhibition of contemporary painting "Eye to Eye" will be open at the Šiauliai Art Gallery.
The opening event of the exhibition will be on Friday, February 21, at 5:00 p.m. at the Šiauliai Art Gallery. Admission is free during the opening of the exhibition.
The authors of the exhibition: Raimondas Gailiūnas, Konstantinas Gaitanži, Jonas Gasiūnas, Brigita Gelžinytė, Eglė Karpavičiūtė, Jolanta Kyzikaitė, Ričardas Nemeikšis, Eglė Ulčickaitė, Pijus Vaiciukevičius, Gabija Pritkovaitė-Vaiciukevičienė, Tomas Valeika.
From everyday hearsay:
A cat meows quietly into the darkness of the bed.
– What, cat, are you meowing? There is nothing there.
Let’s imagine a crossroads between two villages. In one of them live people who always tell the truth, and in the other – people who always lie. We meet a traveler at a crossroads and, in order to find out where he comes from, we can ask him only one question. If he is a liar, if we ask him directly, we will not learn anything. According to professors of logic, there is only one way to make a liar tell the truth: “If you were from another village, and I asked you whether you are from the village of liars, would you answer ‘no’?” Although according to the laws of logic there cannot be any other question, one person nevertheless claimed to know another question that would make a liar betray himself – one would simply have to ask this traveler whether he is a frog.
It is the search for that other possible question – one that would be based not on universal, albeit correct, knowledge, but on specific experience – that could be considered the leitmotif of this exhibition. In creating, an artist always seeks to rethink accepted truths. How, using the deceptive medium of painting, can you make what you see betray its origin? What is the criterion of the image’s persuasiveness for the painter himself? Does it still hold true for the viewer? It is possible that the paradox to which the dominance of visual culture today brings us back is the oblivion of vision itself. The gaze, interspersed with screens and excessive information, is constantly being preempted by the meanings it must seek, the signs it must recognize. An object or image in itself shows nothing and means nothing, but at the same time it can mean anything, as soon as a certain discourse framing it appears. So what meaning can the assurance that I “saw something with my own eyes” still have in such a context?
The silent sensation of vision is what the representatives of contemporary Lithuanian painting from different generations who meet at the exhibition seek to return to. They seek to remember the experience of vision, which would allow us to experience vision beyond its own truth and untruth as an immediate encounter with what is always closest and therefore most difficult to notice: with light, color, form, and finally – with the naked surface. A surface that, when faced face to face, is both the questioner and the one being asked.
After all, even if you can’t see anything in the darkness of the bed, that doesn’t mean that nothing is there.
– authors
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The opening event of the exhibition is open to the public, filming and photography can be done. By participating in the event, you agree to be seen in photos and videos of the event and are informed that these photos and videos may be published publicly.
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