Painting

“In the Café” (1993) is not only a work of painting, but also a document of a certain mood of Vilnius’s era. Here, G. Kazimierėnas captures the legendary atmosphere of the CAC café, a place where artists, bohemians, intellectuals and the city’s nightlife gathered in the 1980s and the first years of independence. Thick strokes, fragmented figures and flashes of light create a dreamy, almost cinematic space in which people seem like thoughts or memories suspended for a moment.

The painting conveys the tension of the transitional period – between the occupation past and the birth of a new urban culture. The figures seem to be drowning in smoke, reflections and fragments of conversations, and the interior becomes a psychological state. In Kazimierėnas’s painting, everyday life takes on a metaphorical weight. The café becomes a stage for the city’s theatre, where the most important thing is not specific portraits, but a general pulse of freedom, anxiety and creative energy.

This work also reflects the early direction of G. Kazimierėnas's work - expressive, emotional, full of inner dramaturgy, even before the monumental historical cycles for which the artist later became famous in Lithuanian painting.