Žilvinas Bautrėnas: “I work with amber as well as with other materials. I don‘t cringe to him or pose. Sometimes I bring it under control of my will, and sometimes it tells me what I need to do. Amber has a lot of unused features, so I try to look at it from the undiscovered side. “

Žilvinas Bautrėnas is a well-known Lithuanian jeweller of the middle generation. In 1999 he moved to USA. His artistic agenda is based on Postmodernist manipulation of cultural associations and meanings. The artist’s world outlook is rich in the creatures and things, which acquired their shapes and names in ancient cultures. Such are amber personages of only a few centimetres in height in the work “Those who Failed to Get on Board the Noah Ship”: the signs of the swastika (the sun) and the grass-snake, exactly cut from an amber plate, the pieces of a natural form, which due to one or another touch of the hand, acquire a similarity to a tortoise or a fantastic tower as well as small pieces of amber resembling nothing definite, to which the artist fixes small supports, i.e. imparts a certain form, as if including them into the ranks of the mentioned things and creatures. Now in jewellery art, like in applied art on the whole, an artistic idea is often based on traditional fractures of the thing by way of demonstrating opposite fractures – as if denying the expensiveness and longevity of the adornment, the jewellery art witnesses the emergence of the articles which resemble spare parts of cars or show their “non-decorative” origin in other ways. Necklaces created by Ž. Bautrėnas are also strung together from segments, which provoke associations with a kind of screws or medieval armour. Their appearance is rigorous, but the splendid amber with its unique form returns the spectator’s aesthetic experience to the sphere of beauty and adornment. However, to the sphere of wrathful beauty, which does not recognize any sentimentally and which is witnessed by the whole of the adornment. The exploitation of the thorn motif – of what is sharp and hurts – for adornments and clothing is not new. In the outfit of ancient warriors, thorns performed their direct purpose, and in the subculture of contemporary youth, thorny bracelets and jackets create the image of aggressiveness. The sensation of “Sharpness” in the earrings created by Ž. Bautrėnas is not aggressive at all, it is rather playful – the tiny thorns harmonize with an original texture of the blue amber and look decoratively. The mentioned motif has a double meaning in a cross: it can be interpreted as a symbol of suffering or only as a decorative compositional element, which unites even plane with the relief of the amber. Ž. Bautrėnas’ creation witnesses the echo of another contemporary principle of art: anything chosen can become an aesthetic object. The artist can fix to the amber necklace various pieces of amber, which seem to have nothing in common either from a compositional or stylistic point of view: one can see among them a flat and relief piece beside some big raw or small transparent pieces. Each of them is attractive in its own way and, therefore, has the right to hang on a neck. It is hard to notice that their “accidental” coexistence is actually staged. It should be so, indeed, because the artist is offering not the charm of order but that of accidental nature. “The Inclusions of the 20th Century” also speak of accidental nature but in another way. A scrap of photo, a work of the watch, a jeans button got into amber and became inclusions. Amber can preserve them for the future like it has preserved for us a tiny beetle that had lived millions of years ago. These accidental fragments of the world will speak of us…