The illusionary moment exists in the works of Antanas Obcarskas. The viewer’s eye is willingly deceived to see different relief patterns. These reliefs are rather low than high, because the existing structures are optically protruded from the surface less than half of their volume. If traditional measure values were applied, we could state that the sizes of relief structures vary from one to several decimeters in height.
And last but not least important are separate primary segments and images of concrete geometric figures (usually of rectangular form) produced with their help. The relationship of the background and a painted element plays a significant role here as well. The contrast between the two of them forms a rudiment of movement in the structures having that special axonometric “turn” or “bend” which creates an illusionary perception of tangibility, protuberance and concavity). Antanas Obcarskas’ compositions are kinetic, as if sliding from one end of an endless surface to the other, attempting to disappear (but unsuccessfully, beating around and musically floating like electric rays in a rectangular aquarium) from the eyes and consciousness standing in front of them, observing and contemplating.
The geometric abstraction created by Antanas Obcarskas represents nothing else but the most real optical art, “perceptive” painting engaged in forming a sense of space and movement. It is the painting dedicated to the eye reactive to optical illusion 2. On the other hand, no matter how disciplined it might be, Antanas Obcarskas’ painting, with its inner freedom of the brushstroke, comes close to post painterly abstraction 3.
Statements such as “close to op art” or “similar to post painterly abstraction” are fairly relative. The whole of the artist’s creative process is like his personal synthesis and history of postmodern art. It is the painting which has transformed from abstract expressionism all the way through performative conceptualism to post painterly abstraction. This could be the case to reflect “post op art” or “post-post painterly abstractionism”…
Generally speaking, Antanas Obcarskas’ painting is characterized by overall cultural experience, free manipulation with former global (by no means narrowly local!) esthetic and ideological values of art history, as well as a conventionally unlimited personal nature of the artist, and his experiments and play with essential images of art.
Excerpt from art critic Vidas Poškus article “Antanas Obcarskas: between script and axonometry” 2014. January.
Translated by Egidijus Mačiulskas
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1. Paraphrasing William C. Seitz.
2. In all the meanings given to it by Clement Greenberg.
