A spine is a vertical axis of perception, a touch of symmetry. Left and right can swap (non-stop), but top and bottom are non-reversible, as long as my reality demands an upright posture (reflections on the water are ok). Symmetry is repetition, rhyme, and echo – until it deafens me and loses its meaning.
The zip opens, splits right and left, outside and inside, here and there. Once tightly closed opaque bursts open, symmetry flows out. Everything turns into atonal cacophony and falls apart creepy in its banality, mathematical step – I observe entropy in action (it’s not only toothpaste that cannot be unsqueezed). Motifs exchange, breathe, stretch and contract; one layer of translucent oil covers another, again. The open is no longer separated, outside and inside disappear, and new dimensions of intimacy open up.
Come closer and look: I am an open container, a vessel, a niche that promises immediate response. But just as glass is transparent and lets light through, it also reflects it, becoming opaque. Giant vertical blinds ro-tate, alternating between transmissions of what happens to be inside and what happens to be outside, flick-ering like a hologram, like ripples in the water, like a patchwork quilt. Here and not there, and there.
Reading portions:
Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model
Rosalind E. Krauss, Grids
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything
Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency
Vika Prokopavičiūtė is a Lithuanian-born painter who lives and works in Vienna. Her abstract works develop from one painting to the next one—one begins where the preceding one ends. Each canvas is an outcome of a structured, acting-as-algorithm, system that adjusts itself during the painting process and leads to a highly associative, poetic, mechanical and abstract image. The method becomes the motive. She recently exhibited at Vartai, Vilnius; Haus, Vienna; NEVVEN, Göteborg; xhibit, Vienna; nGbK, Berlin; Mauve, Vienna; Skulpturinstitut, Vienna.
