Artūras Mitinas exhibition "Aporia"

.Run down spaces always evoke ambiguous feelings of romance and abandonment. They make us question - what forces influence the landscape to become what it is? What sort of agency is hiding behind these manifestations of decay and unfulfilled visions? Automatic, almost autonomous industrial production exhausts the landscapes, radiating impersonal dreariness and social harshness. Artists’ studios huddle in such sites as capsules of human time fallen out of context, and the unknown, inherent to the creative process, is echoed here by inner alienation.

.At least such were the experiences which accompanied the "Crematoriums" series of paintings, created in 2016, in the industrial environment of a plastic recycling plant. Working with the motifs of compressed waste, I tried to convey the currents of melting and crystallisation using layering and transformation techniques. The series was accompanied by thoughts of overproduction and pollution which comes from it, juxtaposing it with the "feelings" of painting itself, as a medium. Quoting art theorist and painter Agnė Kulbytė, in the series "visual aporias, divisions or ruptures, pauses, are formed through the language of painting, where any representing symbols and philosophical reflections are exhausted".

.The exhibition also includes new work based on motifs of run down spaces and the current studio, emphasising the transitional state and gaze of the artist. These are drawings made on layered medical paper, designed to absorb bodily fluids. In them, converging silhouettes are turning into blots, material traces of observation. Reusing of materials and motifs, the recycling and interpretation of them, as well as the juxtaposing of two creative phases, allows us to look at the internal creative and emotional contradictions from a safe distance.

Artūras Mitinas