From 13 May to 6 August 2023, Vineta Kaulača’s exhibition A Matter of Time is on view in the 4th Floor Exhibition Halls of the main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga (Jaņa Rozentāla laukums 1).
For her exhibition at the Latvian National Museum of Art, Vineta Kaulača has created a new collection of paintings. The artist arranges them based on the existing spatial layout – three interconnected exhibition halls make it possible to show independent groups of works, which at the same time are conceptually interlinked. In the exposition, the visual language of painting is presented in dialogue with other art forms – photography, cinema and architecture.
Vineta Kaulača paints spatial structures and achieves sharpened perception by freeing them of what is unnecessary. She stops time or, to the contrary, overtakes it, carrying away the gaze in the eternity of perspective. Would it be possible to remember an event from our lives, while forgetting where it took place? Perhaps memory and subjective perception has transformed the experience of space in an entirely new form. Perhaps proportions, details have changed places or have acquired a totally different order. British art theorist and writer Sally O’Reilly writes: “This shuttling of pictorial language between the singular and the universal is an ancient mnemonic device. The art of memory was a practice developed by classical Greek orators and recounted by Cicero in his Do oratore as a tool for aiding memory… In her paintings Kaulača too has turned towards the object-image, rather than the worldly scene, elevating a mirror or a lamp to symbolic status.”
The spatial installation of miniature paintings takes advantage of the modest format of the works and makes a reference to the cult of memory which gathers and preserves the gaze absorbed in photographs. The interplay of painting, photography and installation deals with the question of painting’s possible perceptions that range from image to spatial object, embodying the principle of simultaneity. Just like we recognise the whole from fragments registered by our gaze in constant motion.
