KLAUDIJUS PETRULIS

Expressionist painter K. Petrulis was born in 1951, Vilnius. In 1977 he graduated from the State Art Institute (now the Vilnius Academy of Art), majoring in painting. Already the following year, he made his debut at the republican exhibition of young artists in Kaunas. Since then, K. Petrulis began to actively exhibit his works in joint exhibitions in Lithuania, later also abroad – in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, Czech Republic, Spain, USA, Canada, Latvia, Poland, Norway, Holland, Portugal, France, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Turkey, Germany. The artist has held personal exhibitions since 1989, there were almost 40 of them.

K. Petrulis painted not only on canvas, in addition to easel painting, he also painted clock mechanisms, objects, created collage art, conveying moods and images of everyday life in a unique, masterful manner. Shape, color and highlighted texture are the most important in K. Petrulis painting. He developed a unique technique in his creations. The artist paid a lot of attention to preparing the surfaces, once the surface was prepared, he would continue creating with a spatula. Thus, the multi-layered textures of the works contributed to the impression of movement. Letters, numbers, and other ornaments appeared from under the overlapping layers. The names of K. Petrulis’ paintings were often invented by his wife, the painter Jūratė Mykolaitytė. Most of them are from one word. K. Petrulis has said that more than two words in the title are too many.

“The most important thing is not to confuse the door. And when entering K. Petrulis paintings, collages or objects, it is not difficult to do so. Dynamic compositions, made up of very different elements, create a world whose meaning is coded, and when the viewer is trying to interpret the said coded meaning, often a playful gambling feeling appears. I suspect that the author encourages that excitement on purpose and later enjoys looking mockingly at the viewer’s efforts to discover the essence of the work. The most amazing thing is that those meanings can change every time, and hardly anyone can translate their indisputably correct cipher. On the other hand, Klaudius paintings are often similar to unexpected dream images, which upon waking up are impossible or even unwanted to be remembered. But traces of the dreams remain. And painting is like an attempt to remind something forgotten. Lost in memory, images settle in paintings. Ornaments, contours, letters, numbers – these are fragments that help to formulate a picture of memory” – art researcher Ugnė Dalinkevičiūtė.