The video artist Andrius Kviliūnas has referred to himself as a geniot – a genius-idiot – and indeed this word is a good way to see an artist whose creative drama is marked by intense contrasts.

Kviliūnas belongs to a generation of painters (including Jurga Barilaitė and Evaldas Jansas) who abandoned their paintbrushes for video cameras and never looked back. Although he acts in, films and edits his video works, they are not autobiographical. Most of the time Kviliūnas uses his body to express universal ideas that swing between the signs of earthly, everyday culture, capitalism and identity, religious imagery and quotes from philosophy and art history. Kviliūnas constructs images in a very specific, Surrealism-inspired way and from unexpected details of everyday life, “folk” kitsch, people close to him, and images from the city of Panevežys, where he lives. His films are like colourful, schizophrenic dreams in which the characters trapped in them (often Kviliūnas himself or multiple images of him) continuously repeat the same action (often running). The resulting monotony has a hypnotic effect and elicits an affective state. It is enough to see a few of his films for this artist’s name to become lodged in one’s memory.

The artist is concerned with universal themes – human life and its meaning, death, sin, and redemption. These are especially prominent in his works of the last few years, when Kviliūnas became interested in the Middle Ages and the lives of tortured saints. For example, his video work Šventas Jonas (Saint John), based on the story of Judith’s passionate desire for a servant of God, ends with her and the executioner holding John’s decapitated head on a platter. In the background hangs the capitalist symbol “Maxima,” while the artist himself leans over the plate observing the situation. The video projection Maras (The Plague) consists of three parts: in the first, Kviliūnas’s body is being christened with water and oil as it gradually turns into a cross; the second one shows the empty gesture of masturbation; in the third, sin is washed away with blood, but, contrary to the laws of physics, the blood flows upward from the sinners’ bodies. Multi-layered religious references and the artist’s underwear-clad figure indicate self-reflection and Kviliūnas’s attempt to imagine himself within the symbolic order and mechanisms of good/bad, truth/lies, and sin/redemption.

The use of contrast and the play of unrelated elements result in films with multiple meanings. Perhaps the artist himself does not quite know what he has done, and indeed, in the 2005– 2006 video work Pirmas potyris (First Experience), the question Ką aš padariau? (What have I done?) is continuously repeated while a pipe twirls on the screen (a clear reference to the surrealist René Magritte’s iconic painting of a pipe and, below it, a text saying that it this not a pipe).

Kviliūnas is unique within the context of Lithuanian video art (though connections can be seen with the films of the avant-garde Fluxus movement, which the artist admits were an early influence). If other video artists (Kristina Inčiūraitė, Evaldas Jansas, Gintaras Makarevičius and others) explore interesting everyday realities and create documentary, socially-oriented films, Kviliūnas was never interested in recording bare reality.

Rather, this artist focuses on his own, closed world and the thoughts and experiences that emerge from solitude and boredom, drinking, and the struggle against meaninglessness. While Kviliūnas’s mother was alive, she was his main model and their arguments about disorder, smoking and drinking were his primary source of inspiration (e.g., the 2006 film Trys nuodemės pagal mano mamą/Three Sins According to my Mother). He considers his film Atsisveikinimas (Farewell), which was dedicated to her, as his most important work.

It is possible that this artist’s life and work on the periphery resulted in the purity and consistency of his style. But this came at a cost. In one interview he revealed that “My circumstances are poor and I have to make art, but no one needs art.” Paradoxically, it is only by creating that Kviliūnas can briefly escape this vicious circle.

Jolanta Marcišauskytė-Jurašienė