LIQUID SWORDS | Paulina Domašauskaitė

The text accompanying the exhibition
By Vita Opolskytė

Wittily Silly (Greek: Oxymōron)

To approach, to stop, to look – to cut through – to step back. I’m speaking it like a prayer, and even with my eyes a little too open, I’m trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of shapes, lines, colors, tones, paints, textures, canvases, glass, aluminum… I get it wrong again. Maybe I’ve been here too long, moving in circles as if trying to relive it again and again – turning away, I see illusions on the white walls. I am distracted by the installation of the exhibition Liquid Swords (curated by Linas Bliškevičius) by painter Paulina Domašauskaitė at the Meno Niša Gallery.  

To make it a bit more “robust” I have to go to a bit more “back”. In the artist’s creative biography, the phenomenon of “Japanese” and “saws” was already encountered in the solo exhibition of that title at The Rooster Gallery in June 2023. In the exhibition, to quote the curator Samanta’s (i.e. mine) annotation, Domašauskaitė “gracefully cuts between the formal questions of the pictorial surface and the passionate, sensory analysis of force.” In the exhibition in question, the young artist, surrendering to an impulse from within and guided by personal observations, elegantly navigated the canvases – clarifying the formal criteria she was concerned with, such as the interaction of the materials involved in the painting, the expression of the brushstroke, the range of format sizes, the specificity of the paint, the layers, the lines and the colors it creates. At the time, the artist referred to these aspects of spontaneous sensation and the specificity of the painting medium as “a moment trapped in eternity.” It seems that this antilogy of the “eternal moment” already then illuminated the mirage of the current exhibition.

It is important to note that, compared to the space of the former exhibition, the layout of this exposition is similarly divided into two parts, but the bipolarity is no longer direct, but rather, by being a bit more sophisticated, it turns into a self-contradictory structure – an oxymoron, which is probably the most perfect description of the specifics of P. Domašauskaitė’s work. There is no categorical difference, both halls are in harmonious dissonance.

The combination of contradictory meanings is also present in the title of this exhibition, but rather than remaining a sound wordplay or a straightforward metaphor for brushes and oil paints, it refers to the 1995 music album and track Liquid Swords by Wu-Tang Clan member Gary Eldridge Grice (aka GZA). Here, the focus turns to hip-hop music as a creative technique and methodology. Many of the works in this genre are characterized by encodings, puns, and metaphors, and their structure is based on loops, cuts, layering, and quotations borrowed from other records. Here, borrowings are not only adapted or deconstructed but sometimes they are distorted and given a completely new meaning in the finished artistic product. P. Domašauskaitė combines images in the medium of painting in a similar way – she takes them, cuts them, glues them, transfers them, or otherwise layers them on the surface of the canvas. While approaching early expressive abstractionism, Henri Matisse’s unprecedented paper cuts, vandalistic street art, or slightly modified abstract art, which is rapidly returning to fashion, the young painter nevertheless remains distinctive in her heterogeneity and deliberate indifferentism. Drawing on archives of motifs, contexts, stories, genres, styles, and media, the artist rhymes images in a highly subjective, almost indiscriminate manner, which can offer diverse, multidimensional interpretations. And at the same time, beautiful images that have no parallels or associations.

The aforementioned song begins with a vocal sample from the film Shogun Assassin (a 1980 jidaigeki film, directed by Robert Houston), which creates a visceral scene of violent samurai conquest and feuding shoguns. The allegory is obvious – the vocalist becomes a warrior in the hip-hop game, fighting against the mainstream and the broken ethics. GZA demonstratively wields his “liquid sword” in this track – a metaphor for the sharp, smooth lyrics that can overcome the feud (“I swing swords and cut clowns”). Thus, the symbol of the sword in the case of P. Domašauskaitė not only indicates the technical chopping up of images but also makes a “Damoclean” reference to the changing and obscure position of the painting medium. The struggle of the flamboyant gesture, the vivacious line, the suffocating colors, the messy forms, and the large formats – the struggle of painterly glory against the dissatisfaction with the possibilities of the medium. The departure from the boundaries of the pictorial frame, the installation attributes, the interdisciplinary, the decorative – all these become questions about the ability or impossibility of the painting(s) to remain autonomous. The painter, on the one hand, creates and, at the same time, destroys it – scraping it to pieces, turning it into an open-ended hallucination, or simply blurring the cultural, contextual, and painterly horizon. This duality – creation and destruction – is reminiscent of the myth of Saturn and, although it does not sound positive, it helps us to see another oxymoron hidden a little deeper. 

So, it is easy to admit that the borrowed title of the exhibition Liquid Swords is very apt. Appearing at the beginning as a sophisticated verbal construct, it effectively describes the creative strategies that are not alien to P. Domašauskaitė and is appropriate to her way of life, her worldview, and her position. Gracefully juggling the image, the author deliberately creates a crazy or even maddening system of pictures that turns the head and at least temporarily takes your breath away. The misdirection is inevitable, but it is integral.