A World Of Digital Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis
Jurgita’ Gerlikaite’s Meditation and Dissolution Of subjectivity.
Various reviews already refer to Jurgita Gerlikaite’s European literary motivation and relation to several art schools give rise to further impact in her digital super reality.
Meditation IV
Looking at the artist’s world, in fact, we may enjoy a sort of hybrid rococo fantasy motivated by mimetic harmony, a crisis of human identity, and strong aspirations to revive the sensations of infanthood. If an artist could create a mimetic world, Jurgita Gerlikaite has successfully completed the original task with elaborate digital technology. I here rather focus on the epistemological background of her works.
Her series of works entitled "Meditation" (2006) depict meditated fantasy in a dreamlike "ego" linked to a mythological "story". On the other hand, using the device of human faces, as shown in "Woman’s World" (2003) and "Symphony" (2007), the artist carefully draws the expression with inner space that tells us a "space" itself creates a respective human "face". The individual "face" has lost its identity and thus individuality presents "relativity with the outer world". The inner space is here equivalent to a shadow of the outer world so thus concrete subjectivity loses its originality.
Regarding her artistic origins, Jurgita Gerlikaite formerly studied Japanese Zen Buddhist art. Though exaggerated outside influences contributed to misreading the artist’s ingenious development, I undoubtedly recognize a synchronous message between Zen philosophy and her works. For example, observing part of an eye depicted in her symbolically entitled work "Matter, energy, space, time" (2006), the face denotes an absence of expression quite similar to that of a Japanese Noh mask. The work is composed of black and white monochromatic colour tones characteristic of Zen painting. The "face" obviously meditates to seek "absence of subjectivity" and "nothingness" of existence. This work signifies the study of existence over representation.
At the very moment where consciousness supersedes "ego" or "self", humanity can gain harmony with the "outer world" which paradoxically subjectively can control the "inner space" of humanity. Here "ego" is just shown as a relative phenomenon beneath dissolute subjectivity. Stories of mysterious adventures are therefore not romantic stories having a successful epilogue but endless reincarnation.
We can here easily imagine the fantastic world of great Lithuanian painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis also inquiring into the "inner world" in a sense of anti-subjectivity. Obviously, Jurgita Gerlikaite’s arrangement of low-tone colours owe a debt of influence to Čiurlionis’ way. Making "space fantasy", Čiurlionis ignored modern perspective and introduced Mandara-like flat composition. In the case of Jurgita Gerlikaite, her technique similarly ignores modern perspective and pays essential homage to the influence from her grandmother, naïve school painter Petronele Gerlikiene. Nevertheless, we must bear in mind that the artistic climate of anti-modernism made Jurgita Gerlikaite a super-modern artist.
Is it too analogous to read more into the artist’s world? I say no. It is quite obvious that mythological harmony has disappeared and today’s "harmonic beauty" represents a kind of kitsch or parody. Jurgita’s world absolutely rejects optimistic "paradises"; preferring modernistic subjectivity to represent a luxurious dream journey. So the seeming absence of expression on the Noh mask-like "face" is Jurgita Gerlikaite’s introduction for the viewer into her dreamlike "wonderland" state.
So we here begin an endless adventure or meditation and dissolution of subjectivity.
– Rio Kojima, Professor of History, Chubu University, Aichi, Japan, 2008. First published in “Jurgita Gerlikaite”, Vilnius, 2009