Digital dream landscapes
About Jurgita Gerlikaite's picture universe.
Secret Worlds
"Secret Worlds" is the name of one of Jurgita Gerlikaite’s digitally created images. The picture shows how good the new technologies fit to this artist's imagination world. We see sandy bottom, over which fine waves create a net of elliptical curves. Here, instead of small stones and sea plants, we will expect to find that entire field of the picture is dominated of manmade patterns - a pattern that at the very first moment mostly reminds of a detail from a decoration of rococo style. The result is a magic and dreaming composition providing the fantasy with undreamt-of possibilities to play with. Is it a detail from the lost Atlantis, which appears before our eyes, an over flooded relic from an old civilisation or, on the contrary, are we in some place far away in the mysterious future? The main thing is, that Jurgita Gerlikaite’s picture gives us an impulse to compose further and create our own world by means of fantasy.
The same can be said about other digital pictures lately created by the artist. By working in artistic practice with several principals and setting motives from several different worlds of imagination in one picture, a spectator is taken away from his/her usual visual routines. We are surprised and willingly let ourselves to be seduced by dreamlike scenarios: dancers in elegant cyberspace ballet, sliding trips in brilliantly coloured fractal amusement parks, playing underwater nymphs, buried desert cities, and much more in this magic digital version of Midsummer dream. A version and a vision of one of Shakespeare’s famous dramas contain not a less portion of melancholy.
It is obvious that Jurgita Gerlikaite eagerly took over the endless possibilities of the digital techniques. They let her continue and develop the experiments she has been performing through the years within more traditional graphic genre as woodcut and photogravure. All these experiments are related to the human world of imagination, also the visual and cognitive challenge of it. By the refined aesthetic means of the art piece we are attracted or, better to say, seduced into the world, where beside the fantastic surface basic human experiences of good and evil hides. Last but not least, the artist tackles such conceptions and terms as sin, evil, light, darkness, decline, resurrection, which we are forced to be related to, not only on the aesthetic, but also on the existential plan.
It is claimed that the new digital techniques either are too simple, too little physical or too shallow. Jurgita Gerlikaite’s compositions prove the opposite. In her hands the digital process transforms from means for playful experiment into a place for existential and metaphysical contemplations not losing a thing of the absolutely visual excitation. By this double grasp of aesthetic excitation and cognitive depth Jurgita Gerlikaite’s graphical art pieces are extremely exciting and competent.
– Tom Jørgensen, art historian, and author, Denmark, 2007
