mgmn is an artist working with painting, installation and digital media. Born in Zarasai, he graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2017. In 2015 he won the Baltic Young Painter Prize. He has participated in art residencies in Norway (Nordisk Kunstnarsenter Dale) and Germany (Pilotenkueche, Leipzig). His work explores large forms of energy, game culture and post-internet aesthetics, analyzing the intersections of digital and physical reality.
The visual strategy of the paintings is borrowed from the mountain textures of the computer game Counter-Strike map de_nuke. This choice is related to personal experience – I observed players in my childhood who spent time with this map in city libraries. This map was distinguished by the fact that players experimented with its physics – jumping over mountains, discovering unusual places and creatively manipulating the game mechanics. Such practices can be understood as micro-interventions into the system, destabilizing the predefined structure of the game. In the work, painting and photography function as an interconnected system. Surfaces and textures create tension, the metaphor of hematomas resonates with the players’ experiences and the broader social context, and images of Greenland glaciers introduce the dimension of geopolitical layers. Otherness here appears in the very operation of the image. Digital textures, transferred to a physical surface, acquire an effect of foreignness – they seem familiar, but at the same time unrecognizable. Having lost their original functionality, they create a disturbed, rewritten version of reality. The metaphor of the hematoma functions as a sign of damage – the surface has already been affected by forces that cannot be fully represented. In this tension between the digital and the physical, control and decay, otherness is revealed as a constantly changing, unstable state.
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