the experience of pre-experience

agne narusyte: "... "all adults were children in the beginning. (only few remember this,)",- said antoine de saint exupery during his "visit" to the exhibition of tadas gutauskas and kipras masinauskas.

this quatation came in to my mind when tadas gutauskas mentioned that he was interested in a "pre-experienced thinking". this could be imagined as a flow of certain speechles thoughts emerging from yet unarticulated consciousness. for there would be no language in the consciosness without experience, an analogy to such a thinking is easy to imagine - it would be a child's thinking when the strata of experience do not press against his eyes...

the return to the beginning of the formation of consciousness manifests itself in the external "childishness" of painting. bright color combinations and weightlessness of forms in the white space whithout any indications of a three-dimensional world remind of children drawings. but after a moment there appears something that denies the "pre-experienced thinking". seemingly absurd figures consist of recognizable elements: flowers, crosses, part of house...

... familar things join into useless and purposeless combinations. they do not belong to this culture and the world of handy tools, where everything exist because it has a function. thus usefulness of things is not yet formed. this is a beginning when all forms and all uses of things are still possible ..."

incantory painting

nijole adomonyte: " ... shapes molded from the symbols are viewed in his canvases. in his assemblage of forms from sundry nations we meet two types of symbols: universal and personal. pagan and cristian symbols, archetypes, pictographs, zoomorphic and biomorphic forms, forgotten, no longer indentifiable signs and easily recognizable characters represent the former. attributed to the later group, are the artist's own creations and details, which can be surmised to be simply ornamental fillers....

neither cultural heritage, nor neologisms are axplicated in the picture. they're not forced to speak. rather, they're used as magic raw material. the desire to outwit the creator and read the creation's text always encounter fiasco. the more signs you recognize, the more incomrehensible becomes the plot as a whole....

gutauskas' paintings are constructed using a process of assemble: surfaces become inhabited by signs, which form new previously unknown prehistoric derivations. the dramaturgy of the works does not appear to be premeditated. more believable is that ot follows the artist's hand, observing how the identity, having lost its form, attempts to adjust in a new situation.

independent from the results (and they vary), the scene allways plagues the mind with several combination of genres. in the other words, within the atmosphere of given conditions, mighty, rising totems stuffed with symbols, inevitably plague the mind what we are whitness to some enigma, some ritual or singular event.... "

culture's signs in space

nijole tumeniene: " ...during the last decade of the last century, some young sculptors having had an opportunity to get better acquainted with the creative works of giacometti, h.moore, calder, and lehlembruck, began tolerating the opposing direction - searching for spacious forms. but this was a rare case because the majority went down the road creating objects. t.gutauskas' works parts the company within this context for he seeks to legitimate the rationale for his kind of sculpture where form in the sundry ways opposes the active expance of space. a new point of view to sculpture itself begins to form, embodying new relationships between space and mass which can be discussed as an airy form born betwixt a dramatic battle between light and form. in this sense, t.gutauskas' rather small, crested figurines of people are meaningful in that they change our traditional way of thinking about sculpture...."