Another Reality The main theme of Ališauskaitė’s artistic pursuits is the multi-layered nature of reality. She explores the less tangible experiences – feelings, moods, dream sand subconscious images – that exist beyond the material reality. Ališauskaitė’s works offer a glimpse into an encounter between ordinary material life and all that is lurking behind it – dreams, visions, fantasies, and subconscious images. It is interspersed with fragments of mediated reality of screens and photographs. Having merged into a continuous stream of experiences, all these realities not always yield to separation: they intertwine and overlap, replace one another like frames in a film, their limits become blurred and disappear, elements of one reality are transferred into another – it’s a kind of dreaming while you are awake. The chosen contrasting motifs emphasize the distinction between reality and fiction, darkness and light, rationality and irrationality, restriction and freedom, the outside and the inside. The artist is searching for their manifestations in daily life and highlights them. She draws our attention to the nuances of human existence that we hardly notice, and brings to the surface what we usually try to conceal. The painter discovers the gist of the matter in small and at first sight insignificant details. The motifs of her paintings are seemingly commonplace: human figures and their parts, portraits, daily objects, and fragments of interiors. However, these laconically simple images are very eloquent. Removed from daily life and its customary environment, each object becomes a symbol, and each movement acquires the weight of a ritual gesture. Ališauskaitė’s approach to painting is personal and intuitive. She looks at the world from her own unique perspective and tries to experience it on her own, seeking to understand it and convey it to the viewers. Yet the painter finds it more important to make an impact on the viewers, provoke theiremotional response and revive their memories rather than tell about herself. The artist communicates through emotions rather than stories and theories, and creates suggestive visual metaphors referring to what is individual and alongside universal. This emphasized all-pervasive symbolism and metaphorical character fills Ališauskaitė’s canvases with mystery, solemn tranquillity, and a kind of theatricality. In her works, the limits between life and stage, reality and fiction, rationality and irrationality, inside and outside get blurred. This constant struggle of the opposites is not lacking in drama, but it is subtle and concentrated, permeated with melancholy. Dark, almost monochromic colours of her canvases confirm the fact that in her work the artist gravitates towards the minor key. Yet upon a closer look, the darkness in her paintings unfolds into a variety of colours. Exactly in the same way, the entire range of emotions with which the painter’s works are charged is gradually revealed.
Text by Art critic Justina Augustyte