Edgaras Gerasimovičius

In an article that has already become a classic, titled “Why are conceptual Artists Painting Again? Because They Think It’s a Good Idea” (1), art critic Jan Verwoert talks about the paradoxes of the state of contemporary painting that are, in my view, particularly relevant for today’s younger painters searching for creative inspiration as well as financial and symbolic motivation. According to Verwoert, after the wave of conceptual art in the 1950s, painting—though it remained perhaps the main field of artistic creation—was forced to discover itself anew based on traits completely uncharacteristic of painting. A work’s formal characteristics, its materiality in general, and an artist’s technical contribution became matters of third-rate importance. The question changed from “how have the limitations of a given field, in this case painting, been reshaped in a specific artistic work?“ to “what means can be employed to create an artistic work that would ask the question: what are the limits to art in general?” Such an ideological shift seemed to have foreshadowed the death of painting—something that has not, apparently, come to pass: paintings today are perfectly capable of reflecting the contemporary world without losing their artistic relevance. History has, however, left its traces. Today it seems inadequate to judge painting as a separate field of art with its own characteristic traits, or to demand of painting some consistent conceptuality since gestures, colors, and figures cannot be translated into words, no matter the bureaucratic precision or order with which they may be selected. In other words, after conceptual art, a contemporary work of painting, even when it maintains all the traits characteristic of painting shaped during the period of high modernism, will always be something more than just painting. Painting thrives between two extremes: hermetic isolation within the traits of its own media and the use of conceptual painting as a means to achieve general creative goals. What does the relevance of contemporary painting consist of? It could be variations of these extremes, the forms of which are determined not by esthetic criteria, but by the functions of power: institutions, sources of financing, curatorial trends, the perception of prestige, and countless other circumstances that transform a painter into a kind of agent within a wide network of possibilities. The relevance of his painting is largely determined by how developed and how active such a network is.

For a young painter who feels perfectly at home working with paints and a canvas in his studio, and who cultivates his own tastes and sensitivity by looking at other works of art, finding one’s own position between these two extremes can seem like a complicated, overwhelming and unfair matter, when the artistic life around him only serves to validate the idea that it is not enough to be a good painter—one must be a good artist. Though this idea may sound banal, this does not mean it does not exist. I believe this is particularly important for the coming generation of Lithuanian painters since, for certain reasons, there remains an ideological discord between the painting and contemporary art scenes. Though it may not always be clearly felt, at certain moments the collision of different paths may lead to mutual indifference or incommensurate demands, while power games are wrapped in the guise of esthetic judgement and professional criticism.

Let me present an example that, in my view, presents a perfect parody of such power games. In Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty there is a moment when the main character, the writer Jep Gambardella, arrives to conduct an interview with a young female performance artist. The artist needs that interview with Gambardella to appear in the press, while Gambardella seems to need nothing from the artist. The performance goes something like this: the naked artist kneels and gathers her strength before running to hit the wall with her head as hard as possible—which she succeeds in doing. As she stands, the camera shows her pubic hair painted red, with a hammer and sickle shaved into the hair. Looking at it quite simply, a hammer and sickle shaved into pubic hair could be understood as a politicized public need to protect and continue life, while smashing one’s head into a wall represents the difficulties of politicized social life that lead us to individual self-destruction. The performance piece’s symbols, it seems, are easily deciphered. As she gives her interview, the artist turns out to be a supersensitive medium, referring to herself in the third person and basing her creative work on “vibrations”. Gambardella fixates on these “vibrations” that the artist is completely unable to explain. The critic annoyingly terrorizes the artist with repeated requests to clearly explain what these vibrations are, which the artist inevitably fails to do, subsequently falling apart. In the next scene we see Gambardella in the magazine’s editorial office. From the conversation he has with his editor it becomes evident that the completely botched interview will appear in print as it was seen by the film’s audience. The scene shows how comical a display of power can be when it is veiled in the rhetoric of esthetic judgment and authority.

The parody of power in the art world is not a new phenomenon. Irony was a part of Renaissance era paragone—-theoretical discussions about the hierarchical position of different fields of art. But irony blended with sadness and hatred became most clearly evident in the modernist era, when the targets of parody became those participants in the world of art who were unable to fully appreciate what the new art said to them or changed within them.

One more anecdote from the period of modernism. In letters to his wife Clara, Rainer Maria Rilke writes about Paul Cézanne’s talent and highlights two mundane, seemingly insignificant moments from the painter’s life: tired and ailing in his old age, Cézanne walks from home to his studio laughing at something known only to himself, paying no attention whatsoever to the children throwing pebbles at him; and the words shouted out by Cézanne, at work in his studio, after he is surprised by a rare visitor: “Work without worrying about anyone and become strong!” This moment from the artist’s life is taken from the life stories of Claude Lantier (modeled after Cézanne), a character in The Work, a novel by Cézanne’s childhood friend Émile Zola (2).

In Cézanne’s sickly persona Rilke sees the embodiment of painting’s paradox, which later generations of artists stubbornly sought to reveal in their work. On the one hand, a painting hides nothing from the viewer—the entirety of its brushstrokes is always open to the gaze of the viewer. On the other hand, the information about a painting’s structure, immortalized on its surface, is not easily verbalized, while various different details mysteriously expand and change with any attempt to squeeze them into one description. The translation of painting into words is an exhausting, demanding, and unsettling endeavor.

In his letters, Rilke mentions that one of his most favorite pastimes was walking through the galleries of Paris on a Sunday. On one such walk he overheard a conversation between several gentlemen looking at a portrait of Madamme Cézanne. In the company of elegant women, one of the men said enigmatically, as if speaking about some crude portrait:  “Il n’y a absolument rien, rien, rien.” There is absolutely nothing here. Nothing, nothing, nothing (3).

As I look at the artistic works uploaded onto the site of the Young Painter’s Prize, it is clear that the great majority of them constitute painting par excellence. We can assign them, preliminarily, to a conservative and a more experimental group. There are also works that clearly only resemble painting, but that are part of a greater project or effort. Some of them are similar to each other, perhaps inspired by the same artists, and as such could possibly be categorized by school. It would be more precise to say that, rather then being inspired by the same artists, they are influenced by the distorted and recreated representations of works by such artists in the changing world of fluid imagery. Painting from nature has apparently become only a means to develop one’s technique to be later utilized in the repainting on canvas of images that already exist on screen. Though all of the artistic works appear to be paintings, it would be particularly difficult to summarize them all as Painting. The shortcomings of some of the works are the strengths of others, and attempting to develop evaluation criteria for each work from within each piece would mean an appraisal not of Painting, but of separate creative worlds—worlds much larger than the images that have settled on the surface of each canvas and that resist reduction and attempts at generalization of Painting.

Without a doubt, the competition’s prizes are important achievements for any young artist. But the most important recognition is the attention of the curators who are sensitive to painting’s subtleties, but who do their work without categorizing artistic work into fields and genres. Such attention can allow the presentation of painting as something more than just painting—alongside sculptures that may resemble sculpture but that are not just sculpture, or alongside films that are similar to films, but are more than just that.

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1 Jan Verwoert, “Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? Because They Think It's a Good Idea“, in: Afterall, autumn/winter 2005, London: The MIT Press, 2005.

2 Rainer Maria Rilke, to Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*, October 8, 1907  [online at: https://archive.org/stream/lettersofrainerm030932mbp/lettersofrainerm030932mbp_djvu.txt]

3 Ibid