No one has delved as deeply and eccentrically into the core of their own body, provoked audiences, and strayed as far into the dead-ends of artistic creation as Evaldas Jansas. Therefore, every exhibition of his is a prime opportunity to once again test the boundaries of art and the realms of madness in your imagination, comparing the convulsive radicalism of post-traumatic Lithuanian art with the current apathy.
Exploring the fringes of art, society, and consciousness, Jansas has become a distinctive phenomenon in the Lithuanian art world. More accurately, he has created the map of this world, delineating its extreme poles and setting reference points for other artistic explorers. Jansas’s work is abundant with satanic laughter, carnival idiocy, exalted self-loathing, and the romantic elegance of a suicidal impulse. His volcanic productivity spans various forms: piercingly empathetic video films, confessional texts, unique documentation, and harsh post-punk revival-style canvases, alongside scarring sculptures and screaming installations. Yet, all of these adhere to the artist’s maximally open and honest gaze towards the art context and himself.
Diving into the grimy, death-infused depths of societal decay, Jansas brings back a bleeding heart of exceptional beauty. Witnessing the constant dissonance between ambition and reality, the absurdity of local art castes, and the romantic traps of his radicalism, Jansas opts for self-destruction and performs it through the refined choreography of the body in the provocative openness of the performance “In Its Own Juice” (1998).
I am certain that such contrasts of brutality and sensitivity, polished ideas and primal spontaneity in Jansas’s work are a true breath of fresh air for the youngest generation of artists. They may not know the artist personally but live with him through periods of self-reflective crisis, following the JansasTV YouTube channel. This is an incomparable, lightly psychedelic cultural chronicle, an archive of obscene Jansas performances, a collection of provocations, confessions, and exposures by figures in the art field.
This exhibition is divided into two distinct parts. The first part, a museological display, reminds you of the context of Jansas’s iconic works. Only the nomadic images from Jansas’s studies, video material screenshots, sketch collages, or Instagram diary cycles become independent works here, forming new contexts.
Why are the sculptural objects so amorphous and strange? Because they were born in the darkness of the digestive tract, not in the dexterity of the sculptor’s hands. They were carried by bees and gnawed by pigs. In the showcase sits a chamber-sized book of boundless confession, “Ode to Routine.” It burns with the colossal heat of a mix of madness and freedom. It is an unmatched challenge for writers grinding bland porridge between their teeth. Each line of the ode shatters like stone, stinks of urine, pleads for closeness, and vomits from unbearable grayness of the heavens.
The second part is dedicated to Jansas’s return to his origins – the realm of painting, expressive, gourmet intersections of art history and contemporary media culture. Jansas masterfully intertwines art, personal, and screen stories in paradoxical figurative painting compositions. Illogical combinations, blinding colors, gooey brushstrokes, and empty horizons recall a world after a powerful explosion, where all television, internet, real, and fictional characters, along with the author, joyfully soar into the vastness of the universe in shattered form.
Jansas’s delightfully absurd painting awakens the hunger for vivid colors and idiotic entertainments. This performative art continues the artist’s characteristic intense, honest, and boundary-pushing dialogue with the world. On the other hand, it demonstrates the vitality of painting as an art form and its therapeutic power against the overwhelming stream of media images.
Jansas immerses half-naked Femen activists and Trump, art avant-garde and landfill pigs, into tangled brushstrokes, creating virtuoso burlesques from them. Jansas’s open gaze, biting phrases, and wide smile promise an adventure, a sudden twist of meaning each time. Every painting of his is a surprise, a momentary reaction, a destructive remake that gives painting a dynamic, primal dance. “My style is dance,” wrote Nietzsche in one of his letters. Indeed, something Mephistophelian is in Jansas’s image, and reflections of fire continuously dance in his eyes.
Curator and Text Author – Virginijus Kinčinaitis
The Exhibition was funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture
