1-27 April 2025, Vilnius, AP gallery.
The exhibition “Seers” is a new collection of paintings and sculptures by artist Tadas Gutauskas (TaDas), which is combined with a musical composition by composer Kipras Mašanauskas and percussionist Arkadij Gotesman. The video and sound installation aims to draw the viewer into a different reality, linked to the rich world of primordial subconscious archetypes, images, sounds and music.
The artist poses the question: what is fundamentally real and important to a human being? It is as if the artist is drawing attention to Seers – people who see and understand, who sense deeper and further in time. The artist believes that the powers of vision lie in the depths of all our souls. Thus, Seers created by the artist are not so much shadows of an archaic past, but rather the powers that are constantly lurking in the human condition, testifying to the spiritual connection between the soul and nature.
To paraphrase TaDas’ thoughts, the advances in the world of electronics and technology seem to be a sign of the progress of civilisation, but the human spirit and its abilities have hardly grown, on the contrary, they often seem to have not improved whatsoever. The soul thus longs for a spiritual reality, a reality in which childhood dreams or daydreams are awakened, a reality in which nature is reborn, in which the mythological and subconscious world comes alive, where it is infinitely interesting and satisfying… For the artist, such an existence seems more real and meaningful than sitting in front of a computer, counting money, reading news portals.
T. Gutauskas’s paintings (7 canvases) are distinguished by their patterns, iconic monumentality and decorativeness, and the connection between tradition and modernity. It is full of secret meanings, pagan and Christian symbols, archetypes, pictograms, patterns, zoomorphic and biomorphic forms, and the artist’s own marking formations. In his large-format paintings in oil on canvas, TaDas reflects on and interprets the magical, mythological, symbolic and figurative meanings of natural and cultural forms in a contemporary way. In his vividly colourful paintings we recognise various dramatic ritualistic trance-like acts of sacrifice, self-sacrifice, the struggle between good and evil, impregnation and destruction, performed by warriors, hunters, fishermen, dancers, or archetypal mythological creatures. The latter appear in the painter’s works as priests of the spirit of nature or of humanity – seers who are equivalent to the Tree of Life or the uncovered human soul, and who act as mediators between this earthly world and the mythical world beyond. Between the body and the spirit, between the past, the present and the future (“Prophet”, 2023).
The 10 bronze sculptures (some patinated, others painted in coloured enamel) look like monumental memorials, hypertrophically asserting the essential powers of life. They are full of joy, teasing and fundamental vivacity. They are also full of a natural, primordial archetypalism associated with the elements – animals (“Curonian Prophetess”, 2023; “Shaman of the Deep”, 2023), vegetation (“Shaman of the Forest”, 2024), fire (“Great Shaman of the Flames”, 2023), water (“Shaman of the Rain”, 2024, “Spirit of the River”, 2024), and the all-embracing air, wind, and sky (“Seer of the Stars”, 2024). The sensual forms of anthropomorphic beings strongly manifest plant, animal and archetypal spiritual elements (this is why the forms of the sculptures are reminiscent of sorcerers or deities – women, men, plants, animals). Some sculptures evoke associations with the anthropological art of the world: they resemble archaic African, Asian sculptures, Native American or Indian art. We can also recognise in them certain elements of shamanic art, totemism, which are also abundant in the archaic layers of Lithuanian ethnic culture: the souls of various fish, birds or plants, fire, rivers or their seers, priests and deities.
In the aesthetics of Tadas Gutauskas’s works, one can see not only the primordial spontaneity and archetypal mythology, but also the childlike sincerity and colourfulness characteristic of naive art, and, at the same time, the sexual playfulness or combativeness that is only understood by adults (“Here and Hereafter”, 2024; “Liberation”, 2023; “Evening by the Ocean”, 2024). The phantasmagorical poses of his paintings and sculptures express subconscious layers, a kind of primordial religious exaltation (“Visit to the Shaman”, 2023), transcendence (“Here and Beyond”; “The Prophet”, 2023; “The Shaman of the Deep”, 2023), magical power (the sculpture “The Rain Shaman”, 2024; the painting “Rain Shaman”, 2023) – and eschatology (“Liberation”, 2023; “Messengers of Light”, 2023; “In the Depths of the Black Sea”, 2023) – are metaphors for the human life taking part in the struggle of the sublime origins and for the pursuit of happiness. Alongside the subtle or sonorous colours of folk culture, the contemporary primitiveness and openness of colour of pop art coexist in this collection. The bronze sculptures, perfectly smoothed and glossy as if they were derivatives of advanced bionic design, express in a distinctive way the fusion of industrial and ecological aesthetics that is relevant to the contemporary man. The artist uses a wide range of dual artistic expressions – from archaizing religious spirituality and naive primitivism, or ethnic anthropology, to modern technogenic professionalism and pop art primitivism and laconicism.
In the sound space created by A. Gotesman and K. Mašanauskas, the archaic, the present and the future meet. It is like a mystical bridge between shamanic visions and the uncertainty of the future that is constantly pulsating at us. The musicians, using an assortment of magical instruments, seem to be playing the present, drawing on the sounds of the past, which evolve into an innovative system of sounds performed in their own manner.
The search for a deep connection with nature, perceiving it as alive and spiritual, as M. Eliade noted, is characteristic of shamanism, whose aesthetics in art is manifested in the depiction of nature and human beings not as material objects, but as a spiritual and symbolic phenomenon. Shamans can use ecstasy, meditation or visions to communicate with higher or just other spiritual realms. Similarly, artists seek transcendence, the otherworldly, intuitively connecting the dimensions of the natural and human connection to the sacred, or the spiritual world in general. Using the paradigm of shamanism, pagan or magical imagery, symbols, signs and the sounds of music, artists are able to express in a relevant way not only personal experiences, but also intertextual interpretations of the tradition of cultural and religious heritage, and thus demonstrate the global connection between modernity and archaism.
Dr Vytautas Tumėnas
