The Lithuanian artist Jolita Česonytė's paintings are a delicate, enchanting journey through the relationship between people and nature, reality and dream, with an ironic and imaginative look at everyday life. Her colours, mostly various and rich in shades, are an elegant dress to human figures surrounded by shapes and animals, which sometimes converse with each other in a symmetrical harmony. Whenever the picture turns chaotic and fragmented, the main human face of the painting starts blending with several elements around it, either plants or animals or objects, generating a fairy-tale world of symbols and glazes.

Dovana (2016)

Gera žinia (2017)

The uniformity and plainness of this painter's colours are ostensible: only when you observe them from closer and focus on the individual elements floating in a sea of shades you can notice countless lines, streaks and circles which make the entire picture alive, vibrant, dynamic. The presence of multiple layers of colours mixing into each other gives you the feeling of a musical relationship between the subject and the reality, of a continuous exchange occurring between us and the nature. A good caption for her pictures may be a famous poet's line: "Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself" (William Blake, The Book of Thel).

Sparnai (2016)

Aukštyn (2017)

In her paintings human figures are predominant and have almost no facial expression. Every element is somehow an appendage to the protagonist's perception. People usually occupy most of the space, and the numerous shades, patches and streaks decorating their heads evoke a deep psychological complexity, sometimes eerie or disturbing. The entire human body is very rarily shown: what Česonytė is interested in the most is the head, the mind. Each painting is a significant fragment of the mystery linking our mind to reality, and for this reason making reality so difficult as well as exciting to live in.

Sesės (2014)

Pietų vėjas (2017)

Even when colours are cheerful and shiny, there's always a certain sense of melancholy and confusion on these people's large faces, whose standard, statue-like features (flat and long nose, little almond-shapes eyes, very thin lips, to some degree similar to the portraits by Amedeo Modigliani) make them resemble masks, floating and maybe trapped in a maze of sensations. You can say they didn't choose what to experience, since they often look alone and mute, lost in their own unicity, their own mind-box, but at the same time curious and dazzled, like fascinated by a never-ending music. When more than a person is present, they mirror each other in an enigmatic and reciprocal appropriation of identity, sometimes through the rituals of everyday life: a cup, a cat, a piece of furniture may be an ironic reminder of coupledom and material responsibilities.

Ritualas (2016)

Kvarrrrtetas (2016)

I think the main elements this artist's works are made of are water and air. They are fluid, ever changing, ethereal, and their colours are more often cold than warm. There is always a breeze, a current waving the colours and dragging them away. There's no background, no perspective, just a fancy texture playing with the characters, which reminds me of Chagall's enchanted world. The most common animals interacting with the artist's lonely characters, sometimes even being part of their bodies, are birds and fish: from the air and from the water they come and speak the fluid language of nature as a consolation to humans' solitude and limited senses. I see a dreamy desire of freedom and totality in this dialogue, as well as in her paintings related to playing music and singing.


Dainavimo pamokos (2017)

Melodija vakarui (2016)

Music, in fact, may be the third element in Jolita's art, whose beautiful notes I was eager to make you listen. Together with the relationship with nature, music is a fundamental part of the painter's cupio dissolvi, whose yearning for a melody of freedom has given us these ravishing pictures.