Martisauskis Tomas

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Studies, residences, awards

Tomas Martišauskis graduated from Department of Sculpture at Vilnius Academy of Arts, receiving MA of visual arts. In 2005 he was an exchange student at Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki. Since 2000 he participates in group shows in Lithuania and abroad, makes solo shows. In 2004 he received the NORD/LB Lietuva (currently Swedbank) award. Since 2007 he teaches sculpture in Justinas Vienožinskis Art School in Vilnius.


Art Critic On…

TO RENDER OR NOT TO RENDER?

The main concern of Tomas Martišauskis is apparently in converting one plastic, meaningful entity into another, though certainly having in mind that this means playing with the category of objectivity. The artist uses such transformations and plays as his main creative tactic. He starts from basics and classics: intertwines issues of his discipline – that of sculpture – with Joseph Kosuth’s rhetoric of “three chairs” (we may well remember here a chair covered with a piece of fabric, which Martišauskis converted into a mini-model and digital layouts). True, that in regard to form the artist pushes the above issues closer to nowadays, confining them to the narrower sphere of digital technologies, or to transformations of sculpture as a 3D object (of virtual sculpture in the broad sense).

According to Martišauskis himself, everything starts from an object. Be it a chair, fabric folds, or a piece of clay clenched in a hand. The piece goes under 3D scanner; the output – a digital code – can be converted in various ways and rendered into different shapes – visual, textual, etc.

That is to say, the material resistance, the “positive” and “negative” relation between sculpture and space functions here rather as mere idea. The major part of conversion (transformation) labour is done by computer, and only after the sculptor himself (sometimes) intervenes again, yet rather as a postproduction operator: the primary object can be converted (yet again) into a text file, number sequences, or a soundtrack of a Mac speech synthesizer reading them. Sometimes the object comes back to more or less physical shape – the clenched clay piece, or rather its digital version, is “restored” manually, drawing an endless vector sequence on a wall or installing a tangible plastic object in a gallery, only, for instant, enlarged to the optimal scale 1:34. Martišauskis places the object, or let’s be precise its digital characteristic into different coding systems and obtains this way different shapes of it (or of its idea), although “objectively” they all represent the very same object. One can say Martišauskis consciously restrains authorial functions and definitions of sculpture, giving them over to the mechanical logic of computer.

Kęstutis Šapoka

 

Curriculum Vitae