From the water, the air is unknown and threatens. The tree barely senses the forest; the tree knows that except the child, everything is forest. From the water, wanting to breathe, I look at the autumn branches of the no-past landscape of a country called Childhood, where water and time are proportion of the same. The image is the word that the eye's silence gives to the lips. The gloomy silence of the empty plate that fills the mouths with hunger and the pockets with tears. I will open this window of perpetual day, between the water and the visual interferences of the screen that is erasing the memory of my life, and I will offer my flesh to the termites of silence that gnaw the beams of my soul. The window doubts between two worlds, from the other side I will be your empty plate and you will be my hunger. From the water we are just thirst.
- César Llorente Pérez on Paulius Šliaupa's intervention in Ocho por Tres. Valladolid, August, 2017.
It happened unintentionally. The lines of the image that Paulius sent me to be placed on our billboard during the month of August seemed to meet those of his surroundings, as if they were made for each other. The mysterious atmosphere of that fragment of street that seems cut out of some other part of the world becomes Paulius' own collage. Inadvertently.
And we’ve accidentally left August, because this piece has completely submerged us in autumn with a single glance. Like a dream, summer has been a lie (and it hasn't left any epitaph). I was hypnotized looking at the water, and snooping on Instagram until late hours at night. «It seems so hard to observe something that is static nowadays, water becomes the organic flickering, the three-dimensional alternative to the screens that we are used to seeing everyday». Paulius shows us behind his house window a sky that looks like another one, but it is not. The subtle Baltic light is a constant in his painting, but this time he took a photograph, turned the water, glued his town to Venice and sent it to me by Wetransfer.
I have seldom seen so much parallelism between the character of an artist and his work, because to see Paulius is to see his painting. Bewilderment, but also something as simple and honest like a patch on the elbows of a jacket. Silently, little by little, this Lithuanian artist turns the white colour into a whole universe of ranges and reliefs. He invites you to get inside yourself by projecting oneiric flashes that are relaxing but at the same time never stop. Because everything moves and goes away, leaving no epitaph, as the water and windows of Tarkovsky's films.
Paulius Šliaupa was born in 1990 and has participated in numerous joint exhibitions like "Art Meets Camera – Closer than Ever" in Cape Town (South Africa) with Iranian artist Sepideh Mehraban, or "The sculpture path" with Miglė Grigutytė in ArtVilnius. He currently holds a Master's Degree in contemporary sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and prepares for the POSITIONS Berlin Artfair along with other artists from his Lithuanian gallery Meno Niša. Regardless of delusion, our artist will continue experimenting with «the sensual impact of the agent» and we will continue enjoying his circumspect autumn-in-summer.