Žygimantas Augustinas' works are influenced by British painting much more than by that of Lithuania. It is not a surprise that his work was met with greater acclaim in the United Kingdom than in Lithuania, winning the 2nd place in the portrait competition organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Painting in a radically Realist manner, Augustinas concentrates on the human being. He creates portraits, self-portraits, and studies of the entire body and its fragments. The artist himself states: “It is not the portrait but the human person that intrigues me. This is just a way to express what you feel when you see a concrete body with all the marks that life left on it. The body does not lie and does not fake.”

The basis of Augustinas’ painting work is drawing. He had been perfecting his drawing skills in various schools in Lithuania, New York and Florence for many years, delving deep into the subtleties of anatomy, perspective and interplay of light and shadow, until he became a true virtuoso of this sphere. In his painting, he employs academic drawing freely and masterfully, augmenting it with achromatic tonal modelling and expressive textures. Augustinas admires British painters Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville and Euan Uglow, as well as American Photo-realists Chuck Close and Alex Kanevsky, who all cultivate realistic painting based on careful modelling and precise drawing when portraying the human being. However, they are unconcerned with not only the expression of the stroke, but also the emotional aspect of the image, while Augustinas seeks to convey the mood as well. The mellow sadness of an elderly ex-boxer, the self-portraits’ ironic introspection and the melancholy of the “bodyscapes” are not immediately evident, yet that makes them all the more compelling.

The major part of Augustinas’ work is dedicated to the portrait genre. Alongside the aged sitters hired by the Academy, the artist himself is his principal model. He continues the self-portrait tradition of the old masters and the artists of the 19th-21st centuries, focusing on precise and psychological introspection. For this purpose, he also employs the double portrait type frequently used in the history of art. He also chooses himself as a model for portraying the existential states of exhaustion, ennui, despair, joy and self-satisfaction, as well as inaugural and initiation rites. The artist’s portraits and self-portraits are closely associated with his works in other genres.

Pieces like St. Sebastian, Magdalene and Judas borrow the physiognomic traits of the former and, at the same time, pay homage to the old masters. The place of portraits and paintings of saints in Augustinas’ oeuvre of the recent years has been taken by new and unexpected interpretations of the human body theme. In 2008 he presented a new series titled Human Body: Sign and Landscape in the gallery of Vilnius Art Academy; after that, he started a new group of works themed Art and Extreme Sports. In these paintings, Augustinas studies the body itself or its fragments with the same attention to detail that was evident in his efforts to convey the physiognomic facial features. Yet now, having magnified the separate body parts (for instance, clasped hands), the artist has turned them into a dominant element that overshadows the horizon.

Augustinas’ newest paintings are more multi-layered. The veristic search of the real is captured in a sober manner, augmenting each detail with elements of Expressive Realism. The psychological study of himself is important to the artist in his self-portraits. Self-confidence is replaced by an expression of scepticism and distance in his painted face. A lot of attention is still dedicated to the scrupulous modelling of the facial features, yet if it was slightly dry earlier, now it is done with pastose textures and a vigorous, firm stroke.

Raminta Jurėnaitė