Needles, 2019, canvas, acrylic, 40x30 cm, frame 59x49 cm
The paintress Indra Grušaitė, the former student of the Professor Vladas Karatajus in Vilnius academy of Arts, has tested several of the creative models. She made herself master of colorist techniques of Lithuanian arts – plenty of views, shimmering with luxuriant and intensive color spaces, pulsating with expansive and vital dabs have been created. However, her new pieces of art as if turn back from decorative and patterned forms of the pictorial art and sink into mysterious world of vision – while paying her respect to the tradition of classical pictorial art, the paintress is in search for something that she could add to the forms checked by time just on the behalf of herself.
It has been 12 years ago that the works of Indra Grusaite appeared to be as subject of interest for contemplations about images expressed by artists of late Gothic and the Renaissance: the very precise picture, glowing colors, backgrounds glittering with abstract golden light and thorough brushwork – repeats the same way of intellectual creation experienced by the majority of the famous artists of the past. The paintress has been especially interested in masterpieces of the High Renaissance artists, also admiring the creation of Leonardo da Vinci, she seeks to grasp the meaning of formulas for the alchemic beauty, at the same time presenting the challenges and giving the chance to the audience to face the new mysteries…just the way Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres or members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has presented.
Mysterious figures sliding out of glassy acrylic backgrounds, shining with darkness or the light, give the viewer a provocative look, while being surprised by their own role that the paintress has imparted them: beautiful long-necked women with black almond – shaped eyes. Enfolded in gorgeous bright – colored veils, they burrow hens, cats and owl. Or they play womanlike games with very realistically perverted white mice, which become independent heroines of the luxurious still – live in the coming paintings.
The precise, clear and secure picture exactly meets the point, while masterfully defining the silhouettes of the characters as if inhabited in these gorgeous frames. It freezes them, protects from the nervous uproar and eternal rush. Physical shape of objects, successfully recovered by tiny touches of the brush as well as the glitter of jewelry and print of the texture, but especially the sophisticated image charades – that is what makes the paintings of Indra Grušaitė the colorful, alluring and perhaps even embarrassing dreams about the beauty. Dream about the beauty are the subject for modern human being to long for in this eternal rush and constant failure to manage the time.
Helmutas Šabasevičius
