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Photoreport of Linas Jusionis’ exhibition Stacks, Plants and Plains

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Photoreport of Linas Jusionis’ exhibition Stacks, Plants and Plains

15/02/2019

Photos: Laurynas Skeisgiela

On February 7, the Vartai Gallery in Vilnius opened a new solo exhibition by the well-known young artist Linas Jusionis. The title of the exhibition, Stacks, Plants and Plains, conjures a mood close to that of a road-trip film and invites visitors to enjoy an illusion that plays unexpected tricks on their imagination. A mysterious visual quality formed using minimalistic tools as well as sophisticated colour transitions discloses a conscious preference for pure visuality and its experience, which acquire an ever greater importance for the artist himself.


Jusionis studied at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, earning a BA degree and graduating with a master’s degree in monumental arts (fresco-mosaic) in 2011. He has been exhibiting his work in group shows as well as individually since 2009, and this exhibition is his fourth solo show at the Vartai Gallery. He has also been a finalist (2009, 2010) and runner-up (2011) in the Young Painter Prize competition.


Jusionis paints geometrised interiors and landscapes that blend in with the rational and precise painting tradition in Lithuania. His paintings contain urban spaces and architecture as well as a minimalist and laconic visual language that brings his work closer to abstraction.


In his latest paintings, Jusionis is focusing his attention more and more on the law of the “the eye’s desire”, which is often devalued in the maelstrom of contemporary intellectual trends. Unconnected landscapes with no clear meaning join into a sequence devoid of any logic, misleading in its aestheticised muteness and transmitting a strange, nostalgic mood. The recurring landscape elements seem to gain significance and work like tropes. Even if every motif signals something distinct, all of them together act like certain objects of desire. The objects to be seen in the spatial expanses of the paintings are like manifestations of the artist’s libido, erupting in a sterile, strictly organised and aestheticised space. A painting is the realisation of the artist’s desire for imagery and a polemical space of tensions, different moods and signifiers.


Linas Jusionis

Jusionis says: “I find pure visuality, disassociated from any kind of meaning, more and more seductive because of its authenticity and a sheer desire for imagery. On the other hand, I have always been interested in an image’s duality when it can remain mute and, at the same time, provoke interpretation. This duality is the keystone when thinking of an image. Any painterly solution of mine comes into being as a response of one kind or another to it, sometimes elaborating on the concomitant associations, and sometimes trying to avoid them altogether, seeking to affect the viewer with pure visuality.”


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