They say that sculptors are the best draughtsmen. Just look at the vitality expressed in the drawings of the conceptual sculpture guru Mindaugas Navakas or those of the early Lithuanian installation artist Česlovas Lukenskas! The young artist Mindaugas Lukošaitis could also be seen as demonstrating this theory. Though Lukošaitis completed studies in sculpture and has created objects and installations, it is his drawing cycles that have brought him greater recognition.

In both contemporary and earlier art, pencil drawing has often been seen as having secondary artistic importance, fulfilling the functions of sketching and exploring. Lukošaitis has shown that this is not necessarily so – that a drawing can be independent, impactful and even more significant than other art forms simply because, as art theorist Virginijus Kinčinaitis has put it, “it is the most sensitive expression of the artist’s thought.” To better understand this idea, it is worth following Kinčinaitis’s suggestion and imagining a musician humming a future work with his or her body, voice, breath and heartbeat. Similarly, in drawing, an artist uses graphite to record meandering traces of bodily rhythms, breaths and conscious movements. Can you now sense the deep meaning in the expression “an artist thinks with the tip of their pencil”?

At first glance, Lukošaitis’s works – in a simple, unambitious A4 format – appear modest. But this first impression is deceptive. One need only look closely at a few of them to realize that this artist has a profound grasp of human anatomy and its movement. With a few precise strokes he succeeds in representing muscular tension, the weight of a weapon, the horror of a grave pit, the dampness of the earth. According to the artist, there is also an aspect of basic craftsmanship: for example, if you understand the logic of how arm muscles move, then you will know what the arm’s position will be and how it will look when completing different actions. The great Renaissance master Michelangelo also painted using a similar anatomical logic, taking great satisfaction in representing his subjects’ complex, “twisted” poses. Lukošaitis has such a strong grasp of the principles of anatomy that he does not even need models – his images come straight from his head. But one would not call Lukošaitis’s drawings purely academic. They uniquely combine social realism, textbook illustration and comics, and the artist often intuitively finds the themes for his works in art history (e.g., the cycle Modernaus meno objectas/The Object of Modern Art, 2011) or in reflecting on Lithuania’s past.

Lukošaitis’s most distinct drawing cycles are Pasipriešinimas (Resistance) and Žydai. Mano istorija (The Jews. My History, 2011), which raise the dregs of his country’s traumatic past to the surface. Pasipriešinimas (sometimes called Rezistencija), which is based on the theme of Lithuanian resistance and the partisan movement, is a type of imaginary reconstruction of possible situations. Lukošaitis modelled these scenes of the partisans’ resistance battles and everyday existence in a feverish burst of creativity, and only when he had completed the cycle did he begin to consciously examine partisan memoirs and historical material. He was stunned to discover true events and characters whose actual existence would supersede even the wildest imaginings.

The cycle consists of one hundred drawings in which partisans’ battles, deaths, and moments from their day-to-day existence are reconstructed. The collection of drawings is based on certain principles found in cinematic staging: the narrative is constructed through tension and release, climax and denouement. Lukošaitis’s pencil succeeds in striking the heartstrings of memory in a sensitive and intimate manner. Perhaps this is because of the connection to actual partisans’ drawings which, completed during brief pauses, recorded everyday moments suspended between life and death.

The cycle Žydai. Mano istorija pours salt on yet another painful wound in Lithuania’s history. The Holocaust crimes of Lithuanians who collaborated with the German fascists constitute an unresolved stigma of shame and guilt with which this country is still grappling. As if watching a film, in the drawings we see Jewish homes destroyed by the Nazi’s accomplices, suddenly emptied streets, looting, cold pistols pressed to temples, a young Jewish woman being rolled into a ditch with a muddied boot, or a pit in which the bodies of hundreds of men, women and children are growing cold. In attempting to reconstruct such horrific scenes in his head, Lukošaitis was forced to place himself within the horror of those events and to assume various roles: I am a shooter feeling the butt of my rifle against my shoulder, a victim frozen by the fear of death, and a grave digger who is digging a pit of damnation. I am forced to come to terms with different perspectives on the same situation and am not given any opportunity to avoid “awkward” questions. There are no metaphors, no mythologizing, no empty words – only an effort to represent objective facts, the kind that we all know, but which we are used to ignoring and suppressing in the hope that we are not connected to this chapter in our history. But this black-and-white-film drawing sinks viewers into the vortex of events and forces them to confront collective guilt and shame always lurking somewhere near the illusion of stability. Existential questions about villainy, betrayal, suffering and forgiveness also surface in the later drawing cycle Jėzus Kristus (Jesus Christ).

Mindaugas Lukošaitis’s family name is well known in hometown of Šiauliai. His brother Gintautas, a prominent social and political activist, currently lives there. Gintautas created the monument to the Lithuanian partisan leader General Jonas Žemaitis that stands in Vilnius, in front of the Ministry of Defense.

Jolanta Marcišauskytė-Jurašienė