nelezirnite.com - graphic artist

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH – TIME RESERVOIRS

   Nele Zirnite-Žukauskaitė is building her world, which is full of pauses, waiting, silence, and light, sometimes even swarms of small strange sparks. It seems as if it is hovering, flourishing, thriving, altering, or sometimes melting and vanishing as if under an invisible transparent glass-shade protecting from noise, mess, desperation, a fable of vehement desires or banal thoughts. This world is safe, but yet fragile as if a reed wavering in the wind. It is as perpetual and yet as momentary as a person’s emotion or vision may seem on the cross-way of time and space concepts. It may be just a sigh, but this ephemeral movement, feeling lasting for only one physical second, may concurrently embrace myriads of images, signs changing like in a kaleidoscope, messages encoded by a line, a dot, a silhouette, which are full of overlapping senses and meanings, and creating a story, a legend which is beyond comparison or is just a metaphor of searching for the meaning of life, an attempt to define all this by an image.

   As the artist herself confesses, her time space, her life’s affection is art, which gives a chance to love in a universal time without being restricted by the boundaries of the past, and lifts the soul above earthly matters, hitting an unsubstantial body out of the real life orbit. According to Nele, the environment changes, but in the visualisation distinguished by the time concept there remains a kernel, accumulating the artist’s universal TIME RESERVOIR, the leitmotif of works remains unchanged – a human being amid perpetual values and temporariness, so strong, but yet so fragile. A metaphor of a TIME RESERVOIR became the essential for the artist while striving to generalize the entire mileage of life, perception, and creativity covered until now. This truly ample metaphor does embrace not only the essential principles of Nele’s world-view, themes of the interrelation between the time and the space, the past and the present being analysed in her creative activity, but also the interaction of consciousness and sub-consciousness, her visualisation attempts, when striving to dematerialize the flatness of etching by granting it the status of macro or micro world or an endless space.
   Nele does not depict or reconstruct nature forms and spaces. A human’s figure, an element of nature, reflections of an object world changing their form in her gravures do not reconstruct the forms of the materialistic nature; they are rather symbolic compositional units of complex poetic phrases or paraphrases. Each element of the images created in gravures is joined into wholeness speaking of the artistic soul’s thirst for achieving such a dimension of illusory via images, lines, light interrelation, or harmonies, which would express the entire scale of ego’s spiritual searches, cognition and non-cognition of the existential meaning, and contemplation. In the hierarchy of polysemic signs in Nele’s works not only a metamorphic symbol or image of a human being taking various forms is very important, but also an ever-changing, dynamic light, sometimes melting in the imaginational ether as granules of bitch-lamps. The light is sometimes bright, tangible, and sometimes it is as if hitting into the darkness, shade, or bursting in a bunch of rays. The light, its relation to the darkness in the artist’s created space forms the atmosphere of unreality, indeterminacy, and mystery. Miscellaneous light or as it frequently seems in almost every work, the light, which is twinkling and transforming into the darkness, creates inimitable, even a bit mystic mood of surrealistic “lyric heroes” or newly created macro-worlds existing by their own laws.

   The “inhabitants” of the worlds created in Nele Zirnite’s gravures are as if elevated above the assumed horizon, or lingering in some intangible soft space. They are mediators between the heaven and the earth, messengers; they hang in the air or hover between this and that side, in the unmarked, unspecified, transitional “place”. Women-reeds swing in the air filled up with anticipation – metaphors of fragility, vulnerability, aspiration to achieve the never reachable heaven, and these metaphors are echoed by another visual metaphor: these little figures are like dew drops vibrating in the wind...

   Not only are the works of the artist full of images of women-plants, women-reeds, or centaurs-bird, the motif of a fisherman is also employed in Nele’s works; it is a symbol of a searcher, who is constantly seeking for righteousness, cognition, or answers to endless questions, and is gradually perceiving and creating a new better world.
   The “lyric heroes” being at the back of beyond, in the transcendental state between the real and the unreal still do not get answers to many questions, for the spectator they remain vague, but just give a possibility to slightly penetrate into the world full of meditation, rather that of senses than that of statements.

   The graphic artist manages to obtain special relations of tones, light and shades. The lines of her vision are graceful, subtle; the form is created by sensitive modelling of ethereal body images, sculpturing substances, aided by light and darkness “grains”, thus providing the forms of human beings with mysticism, secrecy, and transparent lightness, therefore enabling to intensify the visionary of all Nele’s works.
   The rhythm of recurrent motifs, lines, relation of the verticality and horizontality supplement these works not only with vigorousness, or an impression of a dynamic light, but also with musical sounding, which as a refrain frequently echoes the poetical images.
   Technical visionary of the works performed in the etching and aquatint techniques is not an end in itself, it is just a result of an aspiration meant to improve until the perfection the images of the transparent, vibrating, pulsating, world filled with the light, where a human being organically becomes one with the nature, reaches the initial state, when the soul and the light have a possibility to turn into a body full of benevolence and warmth, full of divine idea, at least for a little, for an instance, for a sigh. Or may be it is an instance that contains the Eternity, a word that contains the entire wisdom, a line that contains multi-sense codes, a picture flatness that contains large and small worlds.

   Ample Nele’s TIME RESERVOIRS contain constant search for the meaning of life, beauty, and eternity, the search in the ever lasting creativity process. Artistic quest, life meaning questions and answers – perfect search for god, where theological studies are substituted by sacrificial, passionate work when bending over one more “picture tractate”, which adds up for gradual filling of the artist’s tocher of creative work, named as a time reservoir, whose boundaries and contours are hard to define and assume because indefinable, unpredictable dimensions, interrelations of colours, time, space, and substance lie in the creative work, in images.

                      Art expert VAIDILUTĖ BRAZAUSKAITĖ