Dominykas Sidorovas: Convoi Exceptionnel : Solo exhibition

26 February - 12 April 2025
Installation Views
Overview

The exhibition will be open for viewing until April 12 during regular working hours:

 

Wednesday - Friday: 14:00 - 18:00 
Saturday: 12:00 - 16:00
Sunday – closed

 

The gallery is also closed on public holidays.

We are pleased to present Convoi Exceptionnel - Dominykas Sidorovas‘s second solo exhibition at VARTAI gallery.

 

The conceptual foundation of the exhibition is built on two poles. The first is the everyday and the domestic – echoed in the technical term convoi exceptionnel, which signals oversized cargo. The second is metaphorical: 'A runny nose for you, the end of the world for me.’ A reflection on the tendency to exaggerate events, transforming the trivial into something overwhelming, intrusive, or even terrifying.
 
This exhibition explores the weight of life – the bulkiness of experiences and actions, the heaviness and lightness of emotions. Emphasizing contrast, it presents Dominykas Sidorovas' latest large- and small-format paintings, where everyday objects, their shadows, and their distortions become central motifs. His works encode human trajectories, as well as the events and phenomena that shape us.
 
The palette of the artist’s newest paintings is intense, sharp, almost glaring – reminiscent of a warning sign on the road. His fresh brushstrokes and the clarity of the painted surfaces resemble fleeting notes of thought, captured in the rush of time. A brief impression – the play of passing shadows, a flicker of sunlight – that nonetheless lingers long after.

 

Text written by Marius Vabalas

 

Hedgehog in the Fog: Road Painting in the Twenty First Century 

Dominykas Sidorovas. Convoi Exceptionnel

 

I have been following Dominykas Sidorovas' paintings for a long time and am well familiar with the bends and curves of his work. A few years ago, he used elements of pop art to express the sadness, confusion, and loneliness of the contemporary individual. However, his work took on a very different tone in last September’s exhibition, Morse, where the despair of solitary, isolated searching gave way to the joy of community – the feeling of being together with like-minded peers. Dominykas himself acknowledges how much his new friends are helping him. Given the socio-cultural landscape of the past century, it’s hardly surprising. Concepts such as difference, becoming – becoming an animal, an object, a molecule, the invisible – naturally resurface. This ensemble-like fusion with the environment becomes a force that shapes you, speaks and rejoices through you, allows you to become one with the people you love, to fall in love with yourself within that shared space. Around the campfire, together, you can conquer the night, the ghosts, loneliness, and anxiety – you can conquer everything.

 

In this exhibition, Dominykas seems to be setting out on a journey – a road that invites a new kind of sensibility, urging us to adopt a different gaze. The title, Convoi Exceptionnel, emerged from the discovery of a roadside sign belonging to an international shipping company, marking a truck used to transport fragile, easily breakable oversized cargo. Through the same senses and hunches, a trace, a fragment of an object – lost and later found – or a phenomenon gradually transforms into an artistic subject – a creative whole, revealing an artistic truth. This artistic truth, and its reliance on the events we experience – whether individually or collectively – is central to the philosophy of Alain Badiou. Ironically, Dominykas and I first met at lectures on Badiou at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. According to him, our lives are shaped by four types of events: those related to politics, art, science, and love. Each of these leaves an indelible trace of truth within us. But Dominykas finds his traces on the road, on the way to somewhere. His signature compositions – expansive in scale and in brushstroke – depict objects that transform into symbols or are perceived as such. What comes to mind is the fragment from Yuri Norstein's animated film Hedgehog in the Fog – the hedgehog moving toward its destination, unsettled by the raging wind, the leaves swirling overhead, the looming figures of shadowy animals. Or, just as well, the sunlit chess pieces.
 
The road, in today’s paradigm, rarely echoes the fantastical journeys depicted in road novels or films of half a century ago. Instead, and to our shared sorrow, it increasingly resembles the apocalyptic landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or the absurdist masterpiece of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. We are not only travelers on our own paths but also witnesses to the journeys of others. The first image that comes to mind is that of migrants moving from scorching heat to bitter cold – footprints in the snow-covered forest, torn concertina wire, fragile or already broken objects, and trucks carrying the lives of distant, unreachable relatives. A reality that we live in, yet one to which we often find ourselves unable to respond.

 

I believe this state of mind is perfectly encapsulated in the second title of Dominykas' work, A runny nose for you, the end of the world for me. To be honest, I have little fondness for contemporary sensitivity and peer-to-peer discussions within social bubbles – where the stronger the mutual listening, the weaker the awareness of what is happening beyond, in the wider world. A world whose rising temperature we fail to grasp, having lost, almost simultaneously with state independence, both the levers of rational thought and a shared sense of collective resistance against the forces that deplete us. And so, on our journey today, we are confronted with the consequences – the traces of what we have unconsciously longed for, of what we have been doing to our own detriment for decades, driven by forces not entirely our own. It is difficult to articulate but very easy to feel. We sense the sickness, we recognise the disease, and we can speak of it to anyone – like the young people stirred by Greta Thunberg at the March Against Extinction. To say the world is going to hell and that you are searching for salvation requires no ideology. It requires courage, sensitivity, and the ability to see.

 

Dominykas' work gives us back our sensitivity to the world, which we sometimes lose when we get irritated by propaganda clichés or empty declarations. Anxiety about the world and its future is transformed into the artistic truth of his work, allowing him to establish a relationship with reality. Not only the one that illuminates the objects in his compositions like a flash of sunlight, but also the one that hits us each time we step beyond our comfort zone. This is the modern path of maturity, where we carry the truths of our senses and experiences like the aforementioned cargo, prepared for reality to keep breaking through into our eyes and hearts – like a spectre of incomprehensible horror.

 

Text written by Kasparas Pocius

Translated from Lithuanian by Alexandra Bondarev
Exhibition design created by Dominykas Sidorovas

 

The creation of these artworks was partly funded by a stipend provided by Lithuanian Council for Culture

Works