About painting -the painter’s world

 

Aleksandras Vozbinas belongs to those artists who view painting as a significant form of contemporary art.  While estimating his creative work what strikes the eye first is the synthesis of traditional painting and contemporary outlook of the painter.  Established throughout centuries the criteria of aesthetic value such as mastership, harmony of coloring and consonance  are of primary importance to him.

 

As a contemporary artist he likes to use contrasting artistic means of expression and their unusual combinations.  He joins the game of improvisation and pays special attention to conceptual selection of various elements. His manner of creating is not based upon .mimesis as in traditional painting - he enjoys self-expression, in which traces of subconsciousness may be found together with the tendency for individual paradox and grotesque elements.  Painting as a game and free will of an artist are the most important things to him: they prompt the structure of a picture and modeling of situation.

 

Although matured in the epoch of post-modernism  the artist seeks the meaning of his artistic work through the integration and transformation of traditions, creating modern myths filled with cultural associations which graphically express his spiritual interests and his love for the history - history of Lithuania and other countries which in some way have influenced the general development of art. 

 

The creative art of A. Vozbinas attracts attention by his individual vivid expressiveness in which one may perceive rich traditions of  European painting: fascination of green and brown Velazquez coloring, alternation of large and small forms in the structure of a picture; Piero della Francesca’s feeling of expansive space and his capability to combine any element with decorative space  which at the same time is profound and realistic, arranged according to the laws of tone and color perspective;  conceptualism of Surrealism and its dreamlike attitude - that strange state between reality and dream, between associations that emerge from consciousness and subconsciousness, as if arising from the world of dreams. 

 

However even here the artist remains faithful to the classical tradition: no pathology, no revealing in ugly matters. Medieval visions that do not distinguish between spiritual and material worlds yet, are much closer to the painter’s perception.  May be that is why Yves Tonguy who is a romantic capable to transform spaces fantastically and who is able to isolate himself from private life impresses him most. 

 

Aleksandras Vozbinas cannot manage without symbolic elements. These are windows, doors, grating, architectonic details and fragments, even construction remnants of different époques although sometimes hints of certain biological creatures appear.  Yet everything comes out spontaneously, in the process of creating an indivisible compositional structure and meaning. 

 

The plastic language of his paintings is rather complicated combining freedom of brushstroke with the rhythm of flow down of paints, with open decorative planes or dotted lines.  The deepness of space in the painting is being composed according to the layout principles of decorative patches while the intertwined contours of various symbolic elements shoot up into the foreground. 

 

A distant echo from F. Fellini’s films where real things acquire conditional sounding may be sensed in composition of paintings, because they are presented like a vision, like an imaginary world where it is hard to decipher general spiritual mood from the material world forms deep rooted in our consciousness due to strong visual impressions.

 

Striving for decorativity caused by the inner respect for tradition (which extends from the Middle Ages to Klimt) attaches strange romanticism to his paintings, as if exploiting hedonistic features of the coloring, enchanting authenticity of past relics (although never citing their stylistics) yet at the same time ironically oriented to the faraway past up to the primitive ages.

 

Aleksandras Vozbinas does not belong to those who boast that they are artists.  Each day he comes to his studio, as a self respecting artist stands in front of his easel, drinks his coffee and paints like mad…

 

 Dr. Nijole Tumeniene 

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