User:Henrikas Cerapas

Henrikas Čerapas (born January 13th, 1952, in Papilė) - lithuanian neo-expressionism painter, member of progressive art group "Angis"

Biography

Born in Papilė on January 13th, 1952. Between 1974–1978 m. studied at Kaunas Stepas Žukas institute of fine arts, between 1980–1987 m. studied painting at Vilnius Institute of Arts (from 1990 - Vilnius Academy of Arts).

1995–2017 – professor at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Department of Painting.

Lives and creates in Vilnius.

About

Excerpt from correspondence between Henrikas Čerapas and Swiss painter Pierre-André Ferrand, presented as an annotation for exhibition 'Aftermath', 2019.

PAF: I can’t quite understand why there was a transition from a unique image, which has a peculiar sense of a look in itself and is exactly the kind of painting which excites me most, to a series, precisely to the series of repeated images (Exercices, Aftermath, ...), which, in my opinion, arouse something else.

Could you explain the reason behind this change in your oeuvre, why, at some moment, you felt the need for such a declination?

HČ: I do not analyse or search answers in myself, I don’t ask why it is this way. I used to have more time for self-absorption. I like this saying: “…you cannot stay interesting forever. You either fail on your own appeal, or you become a master” (from Thomas Mann). You can say that I have always worked in series, aren’t “Soils” a series? I used to give more meaning to each work, stay on it a little longer, give it a name like each work was a novel or a poem or a verse. In other words, I tried to create a unique curiosity or significance. Yet I still painted one picture, and as I wasn’t satisfied with it, I painted another. The same happens now, there is repetitiveness in this process. I just moved away from paintings’ self-absorption, for me, it became a filled void. Nowadays, a painting is an insignificant nothing, it’s just a fragment of Nothing, part of inertia – it has no name, it has become a generality. I no longer ask anything of it, no curiosity.

From the annotation of the exhibition "The Great Legend of Painting. The Soils. 1990 - 1995", by dr. Agnė Kulbytė, 2016

"The action is not as simple when the artist documents his works himself. It is a rather paradoxical situation, mere considering that the time is passing by… The artist‘s irony is in regard to the nomenclature of the art world, that has built the image of his oeuvre: the exhibition is the analysis of the life of a painting as a part of a public life form, documentation of the absurd extinction from the social memory.

Artefacts from the legendary cycle of paintings – „The Soils / Dirvonai”, painted in the year 1990-1995: the exhibition will consist of early and later oil pictures, involving a reproduction of a lost work, drawings, projects of past exhibitions, a sculpture. “The Soils” are an authentic and extraodinary painter‘s investigation, that are worthly to be praised a legend‘s name. The abstract expressionistic plastics, informel, was never refreshed in Lithuanian painting in such an open way. „The Soils“ speak about the epic relationship of a man and the earth. The motive of “abandoned fields” is also a polyphonic metaphor, working as a parallel image to those created by Lithuanian poets – “žemininkai”, in other words – landowners, poets, who emigrated from Lithuania after the Word War II, lost their land as equally as their identity. It reads also as a metaphor for the sense of disillusionment that set in following the initial stage of the newly regained Lithuanian independence."

Excerpts of "Overview of Henrikas Čerapas‘ Oeuvre: Alone On the Road" by dr. Agnė Kulbytė, 2015 (original Lithuanian text published Henriko Čerapo kūrybos apžvalga: Vienas kelyje // Dailė. Art. 2015 (2). Vilnius: artseria, p. 72-79. ISSN 0130-6626).

[...]

The trajectory of Henrikas Čerapas’ painting turns around such inertial "philosophy of progress". Alone on the road is the existential state of the artist, where the character is him proper: the one who is feeling, experiencing, believing, seeking and not taking a detached view, as that would mean coming out of the structure of one’s own being, or its collapse. Understanding the essential intersection of privacy and publicity, the painter himself has summarized all of this as follows: "My painting's opinion does not necessarily coincide with public opinion, because my painting is my biography, and only I, on my own, have completely experienced it as a figurative feeling." It seems that he keeps looking stubbornly for a more archaic " formula of painting", seeking to touch upon its essence, and feels the limitations of any kind of rationalization or formalization intuitively. The path of such creative work goes between creation and destruction, faith and lack of knowledge, by relying solely on metaphysical flair. His paintings seem to aim at "objectivization" of this possible insight: they are self-contained, speechless structures, as if protected from superficial interpretations by their profound non-verbality. They seem to have been shifted to the "infinite times" (as Schiller has put it), to the point of no-longer-human sight, to be preserved for long-term contemplation.

The study of the form's capabilities is a task for every artist. In this way, he touches something that surpasses this form. The whole great mission of Christian art is pervaded by the tension of experiencing such "discovery" and "loss", which has brought the formation of art up to its present "boundary". Consequently, Čerapas also appears as an artist of that "pre-turning-point" period, who seems to have preserved the mystery of great art, and also as a representative of his times who is going through nihilism that prevails in the world of painting. His creative path contains the already rare and almost forgotten tensions lying in the very act of creative work. Perhaps that is the reason why his handmade artifacts look like having emerged out of non-existence: gusts that are incomprehensible to the ordinary cognition, roughed-out by brush or ax, dashed upon or faded away, heavy or flowing, vibrating or becalmed. ("Painting is not art. Painting is a church. A prayer. A confession. [...]".

Thus Henrikas Čerapas' major creative line appears to be an expression of profound philosophical and theological content. Painting, on its own, is a way to try to identify and give voice to this indefinable topic that extends far beyond the concept of existence – the one of searching for greater beingness. Although creativity is characterized by intrinsic systemicity–the main figurative lines develop over several decades, they are not allowed to be overgrown by any symbols or significantly recognizable images, or piled up into separate stories. There are existential, irrefutable, eternal structural antipodes operating in the figurativity of his paintings: heaven vs. earth, the inside vs. the outside, the subjective vs. the universal. Each time, this creates a new blend of concreteness and abstraction of the motifs of reality. This makes Čerapas distinctive among variations of neo-expressionist, lyrical abstraction or "new image" painting.

[...]

The most expressive and most original scenic motif of Henrikas Čerapas‘ oeuvre is the one of soils. The possible way-marks for painting them were the motifs with sowers and plowmen in the fields by Jean François Millet, the colorful landscapes by Camille Pissarro and Vladas Eidukevičius, and Claude Monet‘s ponds. However, in landscapes showing the land, Čerapas saw his own idea of painting: to him, soil (a fragment of the plowed field) depicted without showing the line of the horizon became a figurative image containing the whole intrigue of ideas on content and form. For this, even a minimal hint seems to be enough: a small clump of snow or traces of frost, toadstools, stumps, a detail of railway, the motif of a human or sculptural object –everything is made sense of on the surface of the plowed field, on the light that falls on it, or in the lines of farmland. "Soils / Dirvonai" are epic in expressing the existential relation between the human and land. Painted in the beginning of Lithuania‘s restoration of Independence, during the period of "inner turmoil", their figurative form displays a plane and honest human condition that gives out frustration, threat and uncertainty. "A fallow landscape of Lithuania" could be the title of the political tone of that era, which he articulated by means of painting – a multifaceted metaphor, a kind of parallel to the images used by "Landholders/Žemininkai" (post-war movement of Lithuanian exile poets).

[...]

Over this decade of creative work, the artist focuses on the subject of time. Almost all motifs of these paintings have come from his past. The images of his childhood spent near the railway in Papilė include the semaphore, the cooperative shop building, the well, and the motif of two people crossing the rails (self-portrait with his brother). A whole layer of his earlier life has gradually become his thematic field, while the repetitive motifs coming up from the subconscious or from the very gesture of painting serve a sufficient pretext for painting. These signs of the outer world act as unchanging archetypes, not allowing him to retreat into reflections on identity or layers of reworking the images. More precisely, the theme of memory here is essential – its goal is preservation (or even protection), which coincides with the artist‘s effort to reflect on his own origins, (hi)story, and the fate of his family9. He does not take delight in memories, fragments of dreams, or nostalgic moods. "In April of 1945, the catastrophic, desperate defense of Berlin, in which my father was involved – it does not matter to me that he has repeatedly said he was only digging up the trenches – still, in my eyes, he was and still remains a hero, a defender of Berlin. Never will anyone know what his true contribution to this fight was, and it‘s not even so important, but something that is distinctive is that he was "on the other side". This story of the artist, just like the motifs of his painting, is laconic, but seems to be filled with disillusionment characteristic of short stories by Bohumil Hrabal. The "Requiem to SS Batalion" (2006) triptych is a pictorial expression of his own resistance struggle that has run through his life as well.

The topic of time as memory also reflected in one of the artist‘s most important personal exhibitions since 2000, where he presented his oeuvre over a decade – "Ten Years After" (at the premises of a former Soviet printing house in Vilnius, 2007). His quest on spatial landscapes seems to have conceptualized under the title dedicated to the subject of time. The artist took it from a British music band, but the association with this band is actually quite external and incidental. A much more important is the metaphor of time encoded in the title – an interval that does not have a real connection to that which "was", and does not specify a direction in the time zone ("forward" or "backward"). "Ten Years After" is subjective time of the painter and one of his prospects of seeing reality. It was possible to feel at the exhibition opening where he grouped paintings of different phases. Each of them took the viewers "deeper" by its trajectories, with each having characteristic texture, way of applying the paint, and visuality achieved by means of painting. In addition, the artworks hung in a huge space where they were physically torn apart from the walls, metaphorically speaking – also apart from the "dead time", or non-existence. Large, solid, and visually hard – like eternalized instants or extreme survival moments, brought up briefly into the light. Even the titles of these paintings are a kind of metaphor revival. The lyrics and song titles of well-known rock bands have turned into authorized, paraphrased titles of paintings with their own meanings and sound10. Here, word associations are free of their stiff meanings, and when applied to images painted (or shaped in the very painting process), they transfer implicit meanings from the verbal sphere into the sensory field, into a visual plane, thus extending its boundaries.

The exhibition revealed how the two recurrent lines of Čerapas‘ oeuvre correlate: the painting manner with expressive, rougher texture, that requiring dramatic quality of images, and the romantic intonation, preserving imaginative figurativeness of forms (as if a reflection of the synthetism that affected his young years). In these autobiographical visions, the artist also went up to apocalyptic views, as well as to unexpected revelations of intimacy and images of love. He seems to be fluctuating between destruction and possible reconstruction of reality, between motifs of darkness and land (eros) and the symbolic longing or lyrical statements. One could acknowledge his etalon painting "The Last Day of My Future" (2006–2007) as an incarnation of lyrical and elegant epicon transiency, which has matured over decades.

Over the past decade, Henrikas Čerapas‘ canvases have exceeded their usual scale of large-format canvases – the painter calls them mega-pictures (from 2009 to 2013, he painted five-meter long abstract canvases composed of individual segments). Each of them has its own visual genesis: "Young Guitarman's Love Garden I" (2011) and "Cabernet Sauvignon" (2012) are of pastoral genre, "Exile in the Country" (2013) is a biblical allegory, "There Is Still a Place for Painter in the Graves / Tapytojui kapuose dar yra vietos"(2012) – thematic and pictorial variations of in memoriam. These mega-pictures combined the results of his two previous stages of painting: the structural painting in the plane (that which he discovered in the "Soils" cycle) and the maximum striving for pictorial visuality (achieved in the painting "The Last Day of My Future", also in the "Dark Side of the Moon" series of red monochromy", 2009–2010). All this has revealed the painter‘s quest on a new level – the scale, impressiveness, and color effect characteristic of contemporary painting (the author‘s second survey exhibition "Alone on the Road" in Kaunas Picture Gallery, 2014). In these paintings, the artist seems to simply spread out his images in his mastery and freedom by relying on his method and freeing himself even from the restraint of the very means of painting. The inner space that his paintings open up is larger than the one around them, because their spatial parameters are embodied by the very structure of the paintings, colors and stroke vibrations. The brilliantly mastered pictorial form expresses, in its own way, the idea of sound, rhythm or melody, which contemporary composers call "visual music". Here, the energy of painting unveils as an explosion of all visual elements. Despite the associations of these mega- pictures with the images of "cosmic scale" and organic nature processes that are so popular in contemporary abstract painting, it feels like they are not oriented towards the supply of products for the art market, where the fast, effective interference of image is important. Painting by hand and direct development of an image or thematic line, in the case of Čerapas‘ painting, requires a usual "tempo" of being by the picture and deep feeling into it.

The visual impressiveness achieved in the mega-pictures also reflects in the "Live" series of small format works (2014–2015). The painter again, in minimalized form, carries us towards contemplation on pure imagery – the rhythm of the sky and the earth, vertical and horizontal lines. He relies on the harmony of randomness, imprints of brushstrokes, and the figurativeness of a hint (which is the very meaning of the title "Live" – direct, unscripted, from the place of occurence). His pictorial expression is limited to strokes, they are the only elements of the artwork, large-scale components of small canvases, simple motions of scratching lines on the canvas and covering it with paint. They create figurative textures vibrant in sound and, with a kind of playful major intonation, with their pure figurative language (without images) continue the eternal theme of being: the unstoppably, inexhaustibly expanding flickering of the sky and the ground, the infinite horizon and the image in the window, on this side and on the other side. All of this proves that every time, the painter is undertaking radical experiments, and he is not fit to be a stagnant revisionist, but rather a predecessor – the discoverer of new meanings and the custodian of his own world of images.

Solo Exhibitions

2019 – “Aftermath”, gallery “Meno parkas”, Kaunas

2017 – “Les Exercices”, gallery “Otwarta Pracownia”, Cracow

2016 – “Soils. 1990–1995”, Lithuanian Artists' Association gallery (Pamėnkalnis Str.), Vilnius

2014 – “Alone on the Road”, National M. K. Čiurlionis Art Museum & Picture Gallery, Kaunas

2010 – “Contraception”, gallery "Akademija", Vilnius

2007 – “Ten Years After. The Last of My Last”, former printing house, Maironio str. 3 (now Exhibition hall “Titanikas”), Vilnius

2004 – “Paintings. Railways and Heads”, Town Hall of Vilnius

2003 – “Soils”, gallery “O11”, Vilnius

        “Soils”, Antanas Mončys house-museum, Palanga

        “Soils”, The Samogitian Art Museum, Plungė

2001 – “Cahier de Paris / Paris Diary”, gallery “Kauno langas”, Kaunas

1997 – “Bushes and Clouds", gallery “Eglė”, Kaunas

1996 – “Painting as sculpture”, gallery “Arka”, Vilnius

1995 – “Four Landscapes”, gallery “Arka”, Vilnius

       “Paintings. Sculpture. Drawings”, Rokiškis Regional Museum

1994 – “Transformers. Painting and Sculpture”, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius

1993 – “Fragments of Eternity”, gallery “Lietuvos Aidas”, Vilnius

1992 –  “Paintings and Drawings”, gallery “L’ANEX”, Montrouge-Paris

1991 –  “Lost forms”, gallery “Arka”, Vilnius

1989 – “Paintings. Aloes”, Art Funf Show-rooms (P. Cvirkos Str.), Vilnius

Selected Group Exhibitions

“Paraphrases of Lithuanian Modernism”, collection of Kaunas Modern Art Museum, gallery “pop up”, Kaunas

“Silent Collections. Privately Owned Lithuanian and Estonian Art from the Second Half of the XXth Century”, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius

“Lithuanian Art: Thinking through Landscape”, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

“Romanticism without end”, gallery “Arka”, Vilnius

 “Ad Originem 2016”, gallery “Otwarta Pracownia", Cracow

The International Exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art “Expo Chicago 2015”, Chicago

“Contexts of Painting”, XV International Painting Triennial, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius

“Per Kirkeby. Lignum vitae”, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius

“Young Guitarman’s  Love Garden”, Exhibition hall "Titanikas", Vilnius

Retrospective of the group “Angis”, National M. K Čiurlionis Art Museum, Kaunas

“Wrong Recognition”, XIV Vilnius Painting Triennial, CAC, Vilnius

“Radar”, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania, Warsaw

 “Abstraction and Expressionism: Vilnius’ Two Painting Traditions 1960–2009”, gallery “Arka”, Vilnius

“UPS Urgentum praecifitatum sulfur “, exhibition of the group “Angis”, gallery “Vartai”, Vilnius

“From the Country of Rain”, Exhibition of Lithuanian Painting, Drawing and Objects, G. Gounaropoul Museum, Athenes

“Angis 2000”, Picture Gallery, Kaunas

Biography

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Solo Exhibitions

Selected Group Exhibitions

External links