ABSTRACT RECONSTRUCTIONS

Jurgita Gerlikaitė – a professional art critic encouraged by graphic artist Žibunas Mikšys, has left the meadows of art history and theory, and moved to the great reaches of graphics. The case is rare as art critics are often reproached for not being able to do something by their own hands. Therefore, sometimes it is pleasant to gloat and point to authors of the texts and graphics who cannot be labelled and about whom the same thing cannot be said: such is the case of J. Gerlikaitė, whose exhibition "Metaphysical reconstruction" is exhibited in Vilnius art gallery "D'arijaus papuošalai". This is the thirteenth exhibition – the artist creates and exhibits works demonstrating perseverance and productiveness. A logical consequence of this has been a recent publication of catalogue summing up the creative way of twelve years. As an author of Lithuanian graphics the education has been untypical in a way that calls for curiosity: studies in the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts in Reykjavik, digital graphics and non-toxic intaglio studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. However, in the creations of the digital graphics that are exhibited in the gallery, we will not find dour landscapes of the exotic Northern countries, trolls and other personages of the Northern mythology. The artist is more interested in the inner world of man and his relation with environment rather than the re-creation of recognizable motifs or the telling of fascinating stories. Starting her creative way by decoratively "retranslating" fragments of art works into graphical prints and playing with changing their contexts, J. Gerlikaitė is currently on the road of abstraction in the search of the dialog between the abstract and the specific.

Transparent and abstract images make it possible to see recognizable indications of the subject: a moving or motionless human figure, a face remindful of Čiurlionis or the Renaissance, a graphic ascetic drawing of veins of a leaf. Clouds, boughs, grass or a sunlit window. However, all subjects that can be distinguished and recognized are covered with delicate textures separating and dividing the image into many small fragments – each one deserving a separate meditation. This emphasis by the author on meditation space is not by accident: concentration, clarity of thought, inner peace – are the necessary assumptions to see and experience J. Gerlikaitė's artwork. I do not say "to understand" as that is not entirely possible, neither is it necessary. The reconstructions of feelings and thoughts digitally transferred by the author to the canvas are intended for the creation of a mood, not for conveying information. To forming a metaphysical plane but not for telling stories. The specific and abstract levels cover each other – sometimes intertwining gently, sometimes separating for a moment – to perform an almost impossible mission: to reconstruct the metaphysical plane. Who knows what it actually looks like – maybe it is just as reflected by J. Gerlikaitė? Lyrical, even elegiac, feminine and reserved. In the world that is reconstructed by the author (or more accurately: is constructed anew) a bit of everything is present: a bit of poetry, a bit of another space and another time, a bit of an oddity and a bit of something ordinary – so that we do not get lost. In order for us to quietly look at the attempts to reconstruct something whose reconstruction would not seem to be possible.

Jurgita Ludavičienė,  Art Critic. Literatūra ir menas, 2009

Jurgita’ Gerlikaite’s meditation and dissolution of subjectivity - a world of digital Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis

Various reviews already refer to Jurgita Gerlikaite’s European literary motivation and relation to several art schools give rise to further impact in her digital super reality.

Looking at the artist’s world, in fact, we may enjoy a sort of hybrid rococo fantasy motivated by mimetic harmony, crisis of human identity, and strong aspirations to revive the sensations of infanthood. If an artist could create a mimetic world, Jurgita Gerlikaite has successfully completed the original task with elaborate digital technology. I here rather focus on the epistemological background of her works.

Her series of works entitled "Meditation" (2006) depict meditated fantasy in a dreamlike "ego" linked to a mythological "story". On the other hand, using the device of human faces, as shown in "Woman’s world" (2003) and "Symphony" (2007), the artist carefully draws the expression with inner space that tells us a "space" itself creates a respective human "face". The individual "face" has lost its identity and thus individuality presents "relativity with the outer world". The inner space is here equivalent to a shadow of the outer world so thus concrete subjectivity loses its originality.

Regarding her artistic origins, Jurgita Gerlikaite formerly studied Japanese Zen Buddhist art. Though exaggerated outside influences contributed to misreading the artist’s ingenious development, I undoubtedly recognize a synchronous message between Zen philosophy and her works. For example, observing part of an eye depicted in her symbolically entitled work "Matter, energy, space, time" (2006), the face denotes an absence of expression quite similar to that of a Japanese Noh mask. The work is composed of black and white monochromatic colour tones characteristic of Zen painting. The "face" obviously meditates to seek "absence of subjectivity" and "nothingness" of existence. This work signifies the study of existence over representation.

At the very moment where consciousness supersedes "ego" or "self", humanity can gain harmony with the "outer world" which paradoxically subjectively can control the "inner space" of humanity. Here "ego" is just shown as a relative phenomenon beneath dissolute subjectivity. Stories of mysterious adventures are therefore not romantic stories having a successful epilogue but endless reincarnation.

We can here easily imagine the fantastic world of great Lithuanian painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis also inquiring into the "inner world" in a sense of anti-subjectivity. Obviously Jurgita Gerlikaite’s arrangement of low-tone colours owe a debt of influence to Čiurlionis’ way. Making "space fantasy", Čiurlionis ignored modern perspective and introduced mandara-like flat composition. In the case of Jurgita Gerlikaite, her technique similarly ignores modern perspective, and pays essential homage to the influence from her grandmother, naïve school painter Petronele Gerlikiene. Nevertheless we must bear in mind that the artistic climate of anti-modernism made Jurgita Gerlikaite a super-modern artist.

Is it too analogous to read more into the artist’s world? I say no. It is quite obvious that mythological harmony has disappeared and today’s "harmonic beauty" represents a kind of kitsch or parody. Jurgita’s world absolutely rejects optimistic "paradises"; preferring modernistic subjectivity to represent a luxurious dream journey. So the seeming absence of expression on the noh mask-like "face" is Jurgita Gerlikaite’s introduction for the viewer into her dreamlike "wonderland" state.

So we here begin an endless adventure or meditation and dissolution of subjectivity.

Rio Kojima,  Professor of History, Chubu University, Aichi, Japan, 2008

DIGITAL DREAM LANDSCAPES. ABOUT JURGITA GERLIKAITE'S PICTURE UNIVERSE

"Secret Worlds" is the name of one of Jurgita Gerlikaite’s digitally processed pictures. The picture showing how good the new Technologies fit to this artist`s imagination world. We see sandy bottom, over which fine waves create a net of elliptical curves. Here, instead of small stones and sea plants, we will expect to find that entire field of the picture is dominated of manmade patterns - a pattern that at the very first moment mostly reminds of a detail from a decoration of rococo style. The result is a magic and dreaming composition providing the fantasy with undreamt-of possibilities to play with. Is it a detail from the lost Atlantis, which appears before our eyes, an over flooded relic from an old civilisation or, on the contrary, are we in some place far away in the mysterious future? The main thing is, that Jurgita Gerlikaite’s picture gives us an impulse to compose further and create our own world by means of fantasy.

The same can be said about other digital pictures lately created by the artist. By working in artistic practice with several principals and setting motives from several different worlds of imagination in one picture, a spectator is taken away from his/her usual visual routines. We are surprised and willingly let ourselves to be seduced by dreamlike scenarios: dancers in elegant cyberspace ballet, sliding trips in brilliantly coloured fractal amusement parks, playing underwater nymphs, buried desert cities and much more in this magic digital version of Midsummer dream. A version and a vision of one of Shakespeare’s famous dramas contain not a less portion of melancholy.

It is obvious that Jurgita Gerlikaite eagerly took over the endless possibilities of the digital techniques. They let her continue and develop the experiments she has been performing through the years within more traditional graphic genre as woodcut and photogravure. All these experiments are related to the human world of imagination, also the visual and cognitive challenge of it. By the refined aesthetic means of the art piece we are attracted or, better to say, seduced into the world, where beside the fantastic surface basic human experiences of good and evil hides. Last but not least, the artist tackles such conceptions and terms as sin, evil, light, darkness, decline, resurrection, which we are forced to be related to, not only on the aesthetic, but also on the existential plan.

It is claimed that the new digital techniques either are too simple, too little physical or too shallow. Jurgita Gerlikaite’s compositions prove the opposite. In her hands the digital process transforms from means for playful experiment into a place for existential and metaphysical contemplations not losing a thing of the absolutely visual excitation. By this double grasp of aesthetic excitation and cognitive depth Jurgita Gerlikaite’s graphical art pieces are extremely exciting and competent.

Tom Jørgensen,  Art historian, art writer and author, Denmark 2007