The competition between internal and external realities
Explaining the world in detail and understanding it can be approached in various ways. Sometimes, explanations leave more unanswered questions than rationally articulated answers. This challenging situation exists even when we speak in vocalized language, writing, or through art. Questions about the world interest philosophers, writers, and artists alike. This idea is suggested by painter Saulius Dastikas (b. 1971), who lives and works in Vilnius.
The title of his latest exhibition, “The Penultimate Question,” promises provocative silences, doubts, searches for true essence, and stimulation of intuition and imagination. Dastikas’s exhibition invites viewers not only to look at the painting and study it carefully but also to meet themselves through the artwork. Paintings reflect our moods, experiences, pain, and joy.
The act of painting is inherently close to meditation, seeking subtle answers, striving for perfection, and even establishing harmony with oneself. Creativity is primarily a self-analytical confrontation for the artist, an unprepared and almost affective self-examination. Secondly, a compelling and striking work (clearly in Dastikas’s case) appears somewhat unplanned. It can sometimes seem irrational and extraordinary, visiting or catching those who gaze upon it.
Observing Dastikas’s work and knowing the evolution of his artistic language, I can state that sometimes pleasant remnants of memories from previous encounters with painting linger in the whirlpools of feelings and memory. Previous encounters with a work can periodically resurface in my memories and provoke deep contemplation about the surrounding reality and my place within it. Reflecting on and writing about Dastikas’s works, I seek words that seem to embody my current fascination with the paintings, not as if from yesterday but as an ongoing admiration. Thus, my insights might sound strange, but meeting a good work periodically emerges in my personal recollections and reflections.
Dastikas’s works linger, sometimes even get stuck in memory. They periodically flicker in the archive of memories. Why does this happen? The free and seemingly unplanned strokes of Dastikas’s brush burst into our lives like a primal force, disrupting the unsuspecting flow of everyday life. The play of colors reveals and fascinates me with the paint’s flow across the canvas, the rough, sometimes melting brushstrokes. All this signifies what can be called the artist’s continuous struggle with the medium and images emerging from reality. In the bold and brave strokes, silhouettes emerge, and in some works, motifs of figures familiar to our culture. Composition is formed not only by leaving marks with the brush but also by rubbing certain areas of the painting. Thus, Dastikas skillfully searches not only for recognizable forms and their relationships but also for surprises. The impression of surprise is very important in his work.
I dare to believe that from the intense confrontations with the medium arise painful existential questions: what is this, about what, whose, why should it matter, what is the absence of something? All these questions are not about what we see and where we are but about what is within us and what reality bubbles and sometimes even surges outward. I think that Dastikas himself notices in the creative process that the eternal dilemma arises: which reality is truer – the one that lies in our inner perception, in thoughts and feelings, or the one that hovers in the environment and envelops our body, or perhaps the one that emerges from our feelings and dreams and settles in the form of an artwork?
In his masterful works, Dastikas provokes a question (about internal and external reality), leading me to Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) philosophy. The philosopher argued that the inner voice, which converses most with itself, which lies within each of us, is the truest reality. Unfortunately, everything else (external environment) is just an expression dependent on the inner voice.
Later, French post-structuralist Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) criticized Bergson. He noted that the inner voice can deceive us greatly about our reality. Repeating the thought, the voice always repeats it differently, and thus the inner reality becomes a distorted mirror. According to Derrida, repetition merely privileges itself and makes Husserl “blind.”
Returning to the analysis of Dastikas’s works, what is the place of the image creation in this existential duel of realities, in a reality of splitting and continually rejoining curving mirrors? The artist becomes a captive of a unique situation, which I would call “even if torn apart.” Yet clarity is introduced by Professor Dr. Kristupas Sabolius (b. 1979). Based on Bergson’s philosophy, he states that the image is an intermediate state, marking liberation from materiality and meeting the world. The world is not revealed through the image, but a close connection remains between them.
In this case, Sabolius seems to declare a truce between these realities. Moreover, it becomes entirely clear that one of the essential tasks of the artist (and in this case, Dastikas) is to attempt to reconcile these two realities, harmonize their confrontation, and frame it within the painting. Thus, we can summarize that painting, like philosophy, leads us to abstraction and distance from what exists.
Prof. Dr. REMIGIJUS VENCKUS
Humanities, Art Studies (03H). Art History (H310)
Photos – Vytas Nomadas
