The digital epoch has granted art new surfaces, while at the same time reviving old questions – about materiality, longevity, and painting’s ability to serve as a portal of experience. In this exhibition, artists investigate painting as a historically charged yet contemporarily reimagined field, where the digital does not so much replace matter as transform it. Painting here is no longer just pigment on canvas; it becomes a reflection on embodiment, material presence, and the relationship between image and gaze in a digitised world.

The works – pulsing with textures, dense pigment, or even the traces of their own disappearance – provoke viewers to reflect on art’s durability, its ephemerality, and the archiving of emotion through form. The exhibition invites the audience into a space reminiscent of a sanctuary: a gallery architecture where, as Terry Smith and Brian O’Doherty note, the artwork becomes an object of contemplation, and the white cube a secular form of religious experience. Painting, once destined for cathedral interiors and the collective gaze, today once again strives to produce an experience rather than merely an image. This is a space where a new model of stillness, transcendence, and even religiosity unfolds – relocated from the sacred to the contemporary art center. Technology here amplifies our already existing myths – about vision, transcendence, and memory.

Digital aesthetics might appear to liberate us from corporeality, but paradoxically they return us to it with even greater force. Screens become iconostases of memory; the fragility of pixels makes us long for the endurance of oil paint. Within the exhibition lies a question of conservation – not only physical but conceptual. As art historian Marjolijn Bol observed in her study “Technique and the Art of Immortality, 1800–1900” (2017), late 19th-century artists, confronted with the fragility of synthetic pigments, turned to the past, seeking the alchemy of longevity in older techniques. A similar tension is felt today – between innovation and nostalgia, between new possibilities and the problems they entail. The digital promises immortality, yet in reality works disappear even faster. Longevity becomes both a technical and philosophical question: how to preserve an experience that is inherently temporary? Or perhaps the contemporary art space is itself a new kind of church, where the viewer seeks not dogma but resonance.

Contemporary art ages more quickly – yet perhaps that is its very essence: not to endure, but to touch. To touch not only the eye, but also historical consciousness, technological tension, spiritual longing. The digital world generates its own myths – about what we saw, what we felt, what we experienced. And art becomes the place where illusion meets transcendence, where the material image transforms into immaterial experience. This exhibition is a reflection on art poised between two epochs – between cathedrals and screens, between oil pigment and the RGB spectrum, between the desire for immortality and the fleeting nature of visual experience. It is an attempt to listen again to painting’s voice in a contemporary world that is noisy, but still thirsting for transcendence.

Text by Rosana Lukauskaitė

Curated by Jolanta Laurent and Rosana Lukauskaitė
Graphic design by Jonė Miškinyė
Text editing and translation by Rosana Lukauskaitė

The exhibition is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City municipality

Opening friends Būkčia Kombučia