Here, I look at the cabinet on the left: it is closed, which suggests that it could also be opened. Every door is an offer to open it, every threshold is a call to step over it, and every lock is an invitation to break it. So violent and cruel are questions of belonging. I do not know what inside is: perhaps magazines and books, all those office affairs? When shut, the cabinet exists in an exterior space: inside exists in the outside. A hermetic object, a container with blind facades, protects memories, secrets, ghosts, remains of past and future work. But it is organised – I assume there must be an inner order, a system within. Do I also have a centre, a pillar, a spine? Does it give me a sense of order?

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.

The exhibition will run until May 14, 2022 at Editorial project space (Latako 3, Vilnius). Editorial is open Wed–Fri, 3–7 pm, and Sat, noon–4 pm.

Editorial is supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius municipality. Exhibition supported by Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture, Civil Service and Sport (BMKOES)

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