What remains

Rejoicing nostalgia

Marija Rinkeviciute invents a vocabulary of shapes that lure us into their light and matter. Her play with paper, linen, wood, cardboard and other mixed media creates a poetic confusion between gravity and lightness, echoing the artist’s movement between the mundane and sheer poesy.

Monochromes and bleached colours enhance the delicate precision of forms, while the nuanced layering of materials creates near-trompe-l’œil reliefs. Enigmatic titles convene wings, angels, ghosts, mirrors — evoking both presence and absence, eros and thanatos. Conferring a haptonomic appeal to the work, the thin layers of paint, ink, pigment applied onto its surface suggest a caress upon our very skins.

Elusive moments materialise in what feels like frozen fragments of time — their transparency embodied in coats of wax or crystallised dust. Light seems to rise from within, echoing the words of Deleuze: Light does not fall on things, it comes out of them.

The airy planarity of paper co-inhabits with three-dimensional elements in assembled and tinctured volumes — sculptures becoming paintings and vice versa.
In a time when AI and 3D-printing proliferate, Marija Rinkeviciute’s found materials and reconstituted objects offer moments of rejoicing nostalgia.

As the artist searches for an earnest reflection of life’s sensorial experience through her art, we bear witness to the unfolding of her oeuvre — in materiality and in time.

– Tania Nasielski