Her art has been described as expressionist. Ruta Jusionyte's naked, cracked bodies, sorrowful faces, grimacing rictus, eyes filled with “why?”, Ruta Jusionyte's characters, sometimes frightened and haggard, have crystallized for a time something of the anguish, the overwhelm, the vivid emotions stirred up from within. And no doubt she has delved into the territory of her own shadow, to bring back these faces of pain, these bodies hollowed out, gouged, scarred by existence.
Looking back on her art over the last few years, however, we have to face the facts: that time has passed. The page has been turned. Ruta Jusionyte has overcome herself, just as the clay she models overcomes its initial state in the kiln, grows stronger and becomes something else. As if she herself had triumphed over the fires of torment that worked deep within her - that of history, that of exile and that of existential doubt, of intimate trials - her art now seems to reflect a serene maturity. Less expressive, less immediate, less emotional, Ruta's art is now less intimate than universal, symbolic, even mythological.
Of course, this mythological and symbolic repertoire - centaurs, wolves, winged creatures - already existed; but it was above all expressive, that is to say, it brought out what came from the distant interior and the intimate - pain, anger, melancholy, questioning, desire and so on. His sculptures now emanate a quietude, a gentleness, a tenderness, the kind that often testifies to strong souls who have overcome hardship, resentment and resentment to reach a moral stripping away, an acceptance of the world and of others: here, Ruta creates something else. “I'm no longer in catharsis, but in creation, where I'm interested in the idea of the 'good life' (...)”, she said in September 2019, when I visited her studio. Her art is no longer an expression of interiority, of being-in-the-world; the artist has accessed something else, beyond herself. This already resembles transmission, drawing from the collective unconscious archetypal images of a time immemorial - perhaps even a time purely imagined - where symbols, not beings, move.
Mikaël Faujour