EGLE KARPAVICIUTE (b. 1984) is a young painter that had entered Lithuania’s art scene and actively contributed to it already during her studies at Vilnius Academy of Arts. In the context of her generation, Egle’s work is distinguished by its contemplative and philosophically grounded nature. Human experiences are the principal object of her creative exploration. Far from confining herself to superficial rendering of various phenomena, the painter challenges their visible shapes and ponders the meaning behind them, questioning their true origin. Fairly difficult to read into, her paintings confront the viewer with questions much more often than they provide him with answers.
If one were to divide the objects portrayed in Egle’s paintings along the lines of the nature and culture categories, all of her works would undoubtedly fall in the latter one: the painter is concerned in the world created by humankind. In her pieces, the painter depicts a technologised world – yet not one that dazzles the viewer with perfect synthetic surfaces, but rather one that is decaying and permeated with apocalyptic and sinister apprehensions. Time is also problematised in the works: everything appears to be old and new at the same time, stretching from the past to the future, while the present, lasting a mere instant, seems to be absent as such. The paintings appear to be stating that everything is transient, things do not last long, and what we see is but an illusion of the real.
The illusory nature of visible reality and the fragility of the material world are the principal ideas suggested by Egle Karpaviciute’s paintings. The artist captures everyday objects and cultural phenomena, yet simultaneously questions their universal comprehensibility, taking them out of their habitual context and augmenting them with new meanings. Thus an everyday object becomes a metaphor, a sign pointing to thousands of contexts attached to it. Work titles act in a twofold manner here: they either help the viewer decipher the image (as in Jaan Toomik’s Performance, where the title alone reveals that the depicted scene is actually taken from the Estonian artist’s seminal 1998 performance Father and Son) or deceive the former, unfolding a host of possible directions for interpretation. The paintings’ polysemantic and enigmatic nature is further boosted by the very method of portraying the object. Egle’s painted compositions combine features of hyperrealism and abstraction: she paints certain objects in great detail while stripping the other ones down to barely recognisable shapes and submerging these in a brume of strokes, thus leaving mere hints and ephemeral reflections.
The artist wraps the dense and heterogeneous semantic layer of her works in superior rendering of the form. Egle employs the expressive means specific to painting in their fullness and revels in the possibilities offered by them. In her works, she plays with the diversity of strokes and textures, highlighting the effects that emerge in the process of painting, like drips and shape deformations. Another captivating aspect is the painter’s exquisite sense of colour – the paintings feature subtle, nuanced combinations of brownish, greenish and bluish hues, and, conversely, sharp contrasts. Light is an especially important motif in Egle Karpavičiūtė’s works. The artist captures it in its different manifestations, from the light emanated by natural sources to cold reflections on artificial and industrial surfaces. Thus, although her works convey ideas that are far from being optimistic, they acquire a meditative nature, and their dark spaces become lucid and cosy in their own way when infused with light. … Read More