The Museum of Foreign Art, Riga
04.11.2006. - 10.12.2006.



Stasys Eidrigevičius is an author of more than 200 graphic miniatures, 250 posters, ex libris, pastels, drawings, masks, photography, illustrations for35 children books, sculpture, performance, poetry book Erotyki with drawings, theatre play The White Deer…

He was born in Lithuania, near the village of Mediniškai in 1949. At tha age of 14 he received his first Zenit camera, and here starts his photography, fixing the people and items surrounding him. These are the threads of the temps perdu that now are viewed with the eyes of present in his current works. In 1973 Stasys graduates Vilnius Institute of Fine Arts and in mid-70-s starts his visits to Poland where his miniatures and bookplates are well received. In 1980 Stasys moves to Poland where he lives until now. Since 1970 his works have been exhibited in more than 100 solo-exhibitions throughout the world, he has arranged many international projects and his art has received various high awards of different countries.

In 1986 there appears the first face-mask in Stasys’ work and since then a mask is a sign by which he is probably the most well-known in the artworld. Art critics use to discuss what is the hidden meaning of this mask: does it function as a mask or a true face of somebody? Which is the real mask? What is the relationship between the mask and the hidden face? What would appear if the mask fell down? What is the relationship between Stasys and the mask: does he hides himself under the masks that undoubtedly in some feature are mirrors of his own face or does the flat, seemingly silent round covering is the only media that is allowed to speak about the artist’s inner world? Probably it is a kind of double masking: the masks are talking only as far as Stasys like them to talk? One of his works is The Wall of Silence – a gallery of crripled face-masks that shout out the human tragedy in the most of silence and loneliness. Still we cannot look into the eyes of his masks – they are tiny and hides something we should not look in. Probably there is everybody’s inner self, silent and forbidden to communicate. However, probably there is nothing?

In 2000, Stasys invites an actor in his mask theatre. It is his nephew, a handsome young man, who poses naked wearing masks designed by the artist. The result of numerous sessions with the model is a series of works titled „Near the Window”, 2000-2001, followed by the series „White Room”, 2002 and „Paris-Warsaw”, 2003. There tooks place a finely elaborated staging with a detailed mise-en-scene. One can look onto it as an absurd theatre performance or try to captivate the existential rooting. One can enjoy the play with meanings in various levels, from the interspace between the purity, naivity and protectlessness of the naked body versus the mask as a shield, a second skin or the screen in which the endurations and passions are imprinted; or in the staging level rethinking the drama between the living and not living, trying to decide, who reigns and who acts – the body or the props playing with it. Or one can feel the sense of fragility of loneliness, staying eye by eye with the one who is just like him, alone, embarrassed, asking questions with ambiguous answers and still unable to communicate because there are masks: on the protagonists face which is probably itself a mask for some other face (which is perhaps wearing a mask again); there is also a mask on the viewers face and the mask of illusion – the frame of photgraphy that does not allow to meet each other. Only in some space there is a face of Stasys without a mask – still one has to step over the Wall of Silence to touch it.

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The Museum of Foreign Art
Pils laukums 3,
Riga LV-1050, Latvia
e-mail: amm@amm.lv
www.amm.lv