femme-assise.jpg Painting by Darius Laumenis

DARIUS LAUMENIS is a young Lithuanian artist in residence in Marseille.
His work links at the same time, painting (large and small formats), engraving, photography, reportage, sculpture, experimentation and "manipulations and installations".
The weight of the “pictorial tradition” of his country (attachment in particular to
"The icon") will sometimes interfere with his work. As soon as he arrived at the Beaux-Arts, his objective was to escape the “grip” of a certain “academicism” and quickly integrate a more conceptual dimension into his plastic research.
His studies at the School of Fine Arts in Marseille accelerated the learning and assimilation of this conceptual dimension so necessary for the narration and the evolution of his work. The duality, between the abstract and the figurative, the rational and the irrational, remains in spite of everything very marked in Darius' work.
There was no radical break in his research, the icon has changed, it has mutated. It was probably a painful passage, but it was mastered (Darius does not deny his origins). He is aware that these confrontations and these collisions provide him with conceptual material, and that this conflicting relationship between the rational figure and the irrational figure is his source of questioning, the heart of his work and his positioning. And it is on the strength of these experiences, but still heckled by this conflict, that he presents his latest work today.
Large uncompromising paintings, irrational, impulsive, charged with emotion, where form has been refined, where meaning and perception have succeeded the icon, the subject and the scenario. He manages to appeal to our senses and leaves us free in the face of interpretation and appropriation, he delivers us an unexpected, organic, chromatic universe.
These are series that he presents to us in his studio, his large paintings surround us and speak to us and, in these times it seems difficult for painting, it is a real happiness.

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : unknown date
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary French Artists