Gintaras Karosas. The Place.

THE PLACE

Landscape work by Gintaras Karosas

Place is a transformation of the abstract space to concrete shape. Having no clear outlines the negative space extends among bodies, bending itself after their shapes. When saying “place”, we usually mean a concrete place: a point on the map, a market-place, a room of one’s own. We can establish the place with various instruments. We can mark its co-ordinates, altitude, its distance from other objects or even give it an address. A non-marked space fuses into a great number of shapes and becomes an anonymous part of the spatial net.

The most recent sculpture by Gintaras Karosas is called just The Place. A visitor may wonder why not Columns or Four Poles. And here the trip through the windings of contemporary sculpture begins. Sculpture currently means much more than three-dimensional shape in space. And the most interesting usually is not the very shape of the sculpture, but its semantic and aesthetic connections with surroundings and other objects. Therefore, while speaking about contemporary installations and specific landscape artworks, it’s often hard to define where the art ends and life starts. But does it really serve any purpose to define the edges of an artwork?

While creating this sculpture, the choice of the place, as well as its shaping and orientation were the most important elements. The sculptor listened attentively to the surroundings, emphasizing peculiarities of the landscape. A springy ravine was made into a pond: the water flows down towards a “river of stones” or – in other words - towards a chain of boulders. Using the stones and water, Gintaras Karosas makes the landscape surge more intensively. And then a strict rhythm of verticals is added to the floating horizontals: four burning red poles rise to the sky. Eight meters in height, rusty steel columns shine in contrast with green foliage. We could easily start looking for figurative metaphors and symbolic sense, but in doing that we would digress from “the place”. At first appearance, these minimalist poles are signs marking the territory – in a similar manner to optical devices or computer programs with the help of squares framing the selected place.

Onlookers and snipers, however, usually don’t look at “the place”. They are aiming at the object marked on the place. But here this is not the case: You don’t have anything to aim at – long-lasting poles are protecting the emptiness. So where, actually, is this PLACE? In Vilnius, in Europos Parkas, on all sides of the steel columns – right here where you are standing.

Laima Kreivyte, 2003

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