rytas jurgelis balta upė
Rytas Jurgelis’ Paintings Exhibition
For Jurgelis, creativity is like meditation: absolute enlightenment does not happen at once—first, there ir a small beam of light, which gradually grows larger thus providing more and more freedom, space, and light. The artist claims that it has taken him over 20 years to achieve the White River collection of paintings, until the small beam of light developed in his consciousness as well as in his creations into a powerful burst of luminosity and liberation, which is vividly visible in Rytas’ paintings today—in the plane of his paintings that envelop the viewer in an otherworldly amber-like glimmer and a musical vibration of silence itself, whereby the sounds of music are like rain that pours down in pure cubes, each of which individually can fit entire seas of meaning, essence, and content in their laconic concentrate. For me, Rytas’ paintings are the kind of artwork that when I look at it, I can hear their sound, which is similar to the Austrian composer Anton Webern in its reflections of the painting process. It is difficult to provide a description of the White River more accurately than Webern’s legendary reflection that emphasises the incomprehensible creation process and its autonomy in respect of the creator: My creativity never goes the way I want it to, but only the way fate dictates—t’is the way I must. Rytas, with his analysis of the time flow and contemplative topographic journey leading towards sacredness through minimalism and the emphasis on inner cleanliness in his paintings, is reminiscent of the musical search of minimalist Philip Glass.
By developing his paintings from what seems to be strict geometry (cubes), building it like a structural puzzle, Jurgelis is not just a dry structuralist. He is also a fatalist because he allows his creations to reveal themselves independently, with the belief in its inevitable fate to one day light up and illuminate everything around itself. A lot of the visual understanding in Jurgelis’ artwork is dedicated to an individual cube, which, on the one hand, exists as if a part of the entirety, but, on the other hand, is freely floating in that same entirety as if it was separate and independent, which draws the artist closer to post-cultural exclamation that reveals the contradictions and the versatility that resides in the overall composition. The pure colour matter, variety in facture, and irregular and freely merging areas of paint, applied using palette knives, lead Jurgelis’ artwork towards post-painting abstractions and Colour Field painting. The little cubes connect to form a harmonious yet logically messy painting that reveals the meditative beginning of Rytas’ paintings and which relaxes the viewer’s consciousness and plunges him into the reflective flow of the White River. Without constructing forms that are recognisable or named, the cubic flow catch the eye in a suggestive and poetic way, creating a subconscious and logically inexpressible story inside the viewer. The artist’s inner truth speaks up through these poetic abstractions, which, according to Jurgelis, are the only trajectory of his palette knife that has the right to make. The calm and meditative stroke on the surface of the canvas highlights the symbolic plane of the work of art: the cubes that compose the image are one of the oldest and strongest symbols, the geometric code and relative simplicity of which ensure its understanding, interaction with the viewer, and the symbolic expression of understanding of the ancestral world. It is no coincidence that the river itself is an important mythological symbol—an object of sacred topography signifying the connection between the now and the past. After all, all of the rivers appeared from the primeval ocean and is the eternal link to the ultimate beginning and to the fountainhead of our existence. The waters of the river are associated with purification, purity, and transparency. This mythopoetic context opens up archetypical layers of the consciousness. In his canvas, Jurgelis is weaving an entire World and reveals an unchanging essence in the World’s ever-changing forms—the brightening white river flow and relentless change, in which we are eternal.
In 1995, Rytas Jurgelis has become a member of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association.
In 2006, the artist was granted the status of Lithuanian Art Creator.
Since 1987, personal exhibitions have been organised in Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark and Latvia.
He has participated in more than 40 group projects.
Vilma Kilinskienė, Art Critic.
