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Painter Viktorija Kemeklė: I see painting as a medium to express things that cannot be put into words

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Rūta Matulevičiūtė/Tie2.lt

Viktorija Kemeklė is a painter who graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with a Bachelor’s degree in Painting in 2021 and a Master’s degree in Painting in 2024. In 2022 she studied at the French art school École Supérieure d’Art et de Design, Reims, as part of an exchange programme.

The artist has held solo exhibitions at the Beatričė Grincevičiūtė Memorial Apartment-Museum, “Play dead”, “Tranzitas” at the Pilaitė Library, “Limbo” at the “Akademija” Gallery, as well as participated in various projects and group exhibitions.

Let’s start with the most important. What is the biggest inspiration for your work? How does it show up in your art?

The biggest inspiration for my work is existential themes, particularly about human existence and nature. I find this extremely interesting, and it seems to be the most important topic. It is also inexhaustible; it can be approached from many different perspectives, and it can be updated in any period of world history. It is also very interesting how human consciousness, thought, and the subconscious mind work. I’m always trying to explain this in my work—how my own mind and worldview work, and how others’ minds work, and where our views overlap. Some questions are probably impossible to answer completely, which is why they interest me so much. When everything is clear from the start, there is no room for creativity. I see painting as a medium for the expression of thought and flair, as a kind of communication to express things that cannot be put into words. In my work, I try to express this with light-dark contrasts, with dark colours that hide various shapes, and I also use flashes of light as a motif, as a reference to the following of divine light.

Have you always wanted to be an artist? How did you start creating?

When I was very young, I wanted to be a cat queen, but when I started to understand what a profession was, I realized that art and creativity would be the second-best choice. Then I announced to everyone in my family that I was going to be an “artist,” but nobody took it seriously at the time. From a very young age, I loved to draw, and when I ran out of my favorite cartoon episodes, I would draw them for myself, even though it was more like a comic book than what I do now. I would consider that to be the beginning of my art, even though it was very simple. Of course, then the art classes started at school, where I had very motivating art teachers, and my fascination with art grew continuously.

What do you want the viewer to see in your painting?

I would like the viewer to see in my paintings a part of their own reflection. I often use mundane images, which I believe are recognizable to most people, and in that domesticity, I want to find a common human experience—something that transcends the self, and something that is more unifying, like the human being as it is in this age.

You paint cityscapes, with light motifs appearing in many places. How do you choose the images for your paintings?

I always look for images that have a multifaceted feel to them, maybe a little threatening or at the same time comfortable in their recognizability. At the moment, the moment of observation is also important for me, for example, whether I have the feeling that someone is looking at me from the image, or whether I feel a gaze watching me. The lights in the darkness act like the glowing eyes of a predator; that’s what I’m very interested in visually. People tend to recognize faces where there are none, and I’m always fascinated by the characters of cars, their ‘faces’, and especially what I think of as the ‘eyes of cars’—the headlights. I take a lot of photographs in my daily life, and I have a large album of images of all kinds of lights, flashes, etc. Then I choose from all that, and in the end, the images I choose to paint are based on a hunch: how a particular image makes me feel; some images are more suggestive, some less so.

What is the significance of your colour choices?

My paintings are mainly dominated by dark colours. This allows the small speck of light to become the most important part. Also, a lot of my work has more cold colours than warm colours. The cold colours create a kind of stiffening, slow impression, and when warmer colours appear, like red or orange, they have a warning effect, like an alarm.

Is the process of making a painting and observing it similar?

I think both the process of making a painting and observing it have similar aspects. Like the making, the observing happens over time, with time. Of course, it takes time to paint a painting; it takes time to see it, to understand it. It also happens with movement. There is a lot of movement in painting; sometimes it can even look like a kind of dance, and all these movements are captured by brushstrokes on the canvas. So, when we look at the whole painting, we also have to move around it, to go around it and see it in space from different perspectives. There is one aspect of observation that is slightly different from the process of painting, and that is the initial seeing, the first impression, which is very instantaneous. In the painting process, I could only compare it to spotting a motif, but that happens before you start painting.

During your studies, you took part in an exchange programme in France. How did the new location and cultural context change/not change your approach to the creative process?

When I went to France, I realised that my work needed stability. I had to spend some time getting used to the new environment. At that time, I was looking for motifs, but I could only paint what I had brought back from Lithuania. And when I returned home, only when I started to make sense of my trip could I paint what I saw there. My own painting process is very reflexive and needs time to settle in my mind. This is what I learned about myself after I left.
The methods of the French school are also different from those in Lithuania. There, all the art students work in one space, together, exchanging ideas and knowledge, even though the disciplines they practice are different. Also, their teachers are always encouraging them to break out of the traditional frameworks. In Lithuania, on the contrary, painters work with painters, sculptors work with sculptors, and so on. I think there is a little less opportunity for collaboration between disciplines in our studies compared to what I saw in France. I would say that in contemporary art, this seems to be quite important. But our advantage is that we have more time to get into the discipline, to know it well. It was really interesting and useful to be in France, but I’m glad that I finished my studies in Vilnius.

In the “I am Not a Robot” triptych, you use dark colours to depict faces created by artificial intelligence. What are your premonitions about AI becoming more and more a part of our lives? Do you see AI as a potentially useful tool or as a danger?

In this triptych, the barely visible faces are portraits of non-existent people. As far as I know, in very simple terms, they are created from a database held by one website, which is full of photographs of real people’s faces. The features of different people’s faces are ‘melded’ into one new, fake face. This website (thispersondoesnotexist.com) predates our current artificial intelligence by a long way, although the faces look quite realistic. Without knowing it, I could be fooled by seeing such pictures. There is a very strange feeling when I look at those faces. It is as if they are all our faces in one. There is something familiar about them, like a passer-by on the street. It is a similar feeling when we think about artificial intelligence and its future potential. I am not an expert on the subject, but as far as I understand it, artificial intelligence is trained by what people have already created, by the way they communicate with each other. I think it may be a kind of reflection of our collective subconscious. If we believe that we are genuinely good, we can believe that artificial intelligence will not be a threat. At the moment, I tend to be sceptical about artificial intelligence. I think it is a fashion bubble that will have to collapse at some point. What is important now is to take a very good look at the ethics of its use, to look at the laws for it, and to see where we are going with it. It may be a useful tool in certain areas, but, at least for the moment, I do not see how it will fit into the art world. Unless artificial intelligence can be a creative subject, but not a tool to replace the paintbrush.

In the exhibition “LIMBO,” presented at the Akademija Gallery in the spring of 2024, you talked about a state of transition. Looking at world events, we can see the logic in the fact that transitional states are a favourite theme among artists at the moment. What are your premonitions for the future? Where is this transitional state leading? Do you feel a personal state of transition that is reflected in your work?

I think, in general, human life is an ever-changing thing. I constantly feel this state, and I try to translate it into my paintings. And where in the global context this state leads is difficult to say. Sometimes there is a feeling that a big change is about to happen at any moment, and at other moments it feels as if everything is the same as it has always been. I would like to hope that if there is going to be any change, it will be for the better, but it is uncomfortable waiting for it.

What do you think we can do to make culture and art more valued? How does your work contribute to this goal?

Perhaps culture and art should be more accessible. There is a bit of a divide between the art world and the rest of the world. Education on this issue is not only useful but also necessary. I think that in order to make people more inclined to accept and appreciate art, there should also be more dissemination of information by the art institutions themselves and a clear presentation of its importance.
I always try to convey my own work in a sincere, recognisable way, without trying to preach to the viewer, but simply by showing how I saw or felt a certain phenomenon or image. But whether this is good or bad, I leave it to the viewer to decide.

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