"The Small Version of the Grand Chaos" by Eimutis Markūnas

It is said that when an artist captures an idea he does not let go of it before he has fully realized it. This exhibition of works by Eimutis Markūnas is the resume of the works created in the course of the past six years using the graphite technique. These works using the graphite technique are executed in one go but it does not mean that they are created fast and without any effort. Large scale canvases are placed on the floor, and Eimutis Markūnas, like a Jackson Pollock, without any preparatory sketches, creates them right here and right now. The completed work is left to dry. It is during the drying process that grey shades darken – and in this miraculous way painting becomes similar to photography in the symbolic way. And as the artist himself says, „It is never possible to guess the final result”. 

In the title of the exhibition – The Small Version of the Grand Chaos – E. Markūnas attempts to encompass all the titles of the exhibited works. It is not surprising that in this exhibition the artist leaves the works untitled. The works created in gestural, action painting express the artist’s current creative period and the contemporary time.

Images emerging out of the greyish brown, bright yellow surface tease the viewer’s eye but do that pleasantly and invite the gaze to get lost, to submerge itself in the small version of the grand chaos. Since there are several layers of paint put onto each other, the surface acquires the three dimensional picture, painting moves into photography. The balancing, the intermediate state between one and another is the feature often encountered in the art of E. Markūnas – the balancing between precise aesthetics and often even brutal brushwork manifests in this exhibition The Small Version of the Grand Chaos. 

In this exhibition the viewer is placed in two states: rationality (the themes of the works, structures) and intuition (the technological process when it is not known how it will all end and optics bewitching the gaze). It is these two states that constitute the essential strategy of the works in this exhibition.

“Graphite as the material has got unique characteristics: it can become a diamond though it has come out of the death process – burning, charring.  It is these latter qualities and the information sent by the material that supply the works with the needed context and connection”, the artist states.

What will follow after this period of the works created using the graphite technique? The answer is given by E.Markūnas himself: “Something has to begin”.