Leonidas Alekseiko is a painter belonging to the younger generation who lives and works in Kaunas. Having entered Vilnius Academy of Arts, Kaunas faculty to study glass in 2008, he then switched to painting in 2010, graduating in it in 2013 and earning his MA in painting in 2015.

Alekseiko's painting style formed already during his studies. At that time, he was an active participant in group exhibitions, and he was awarded one of his most important awards (the 2014 Additional Young Painter Prize together with the Public's Choice Award) as he was completing his MA. Alekseiko's first audience, who had seen class critiques of his paintings and his degree works, now too can easily recognize the young painter's style. In the Lithuanian context, his works are comparable to a growing albeit not dominant trend of new realism or hyperrealism (think of works by Jūratė Jarulytė, Augustinas Žygimantas, Patricija Jurkšaitytė and others).

Stylistics of new realism that the author came to like early on and mastered had a significant impact on his work. He has been developing a series of paintings for a long time now (Environment that shapes), while his individual works too (Mother and brother, 2013; Family, Self-Portrait, both 2014) remind of an integral story told by the author as if remaining within a certain space he himself created which consists of his most immediate environment. It is not accidental that his paintings can be compared to a personal photo album; in it, you can find a lot of household scenes, fragments of “doing nothing”, posing, “failed” photos with figures turning their backs, and so on. And yet, all these unsuccessful attempts that are usually only of interest to family members are successfully transformed in painting into a universal object of inspection. This happens when the painter chooses realism of the 21st century as a starting point and mystifies random photographic compositions.

While he skilfully creates subdued environments of dark colours (think of apartment interiors or spaces with statues in the Academy of Arts), Alekseiko stays away from summarizing, concealing details or facilitating the task for the viewer, since he does not points out the most important meanings of the space being portrayed. Similarly to the old literary masters who were able to reveal the beauty of unseen imagery to the reader using ekphrasis (pictorial description), this young painter forces the viewer to “read” all the “trifles” in the painting again and again until they begin to suspect the everyday environment of hiding some far from commonplace things.

Kristina Budrytė