VIKTORIJA DAMERELL

There are words which spring from our universal imagination. Goya, the deaf painter, wakes up from a royal nightmare. A sinister kids' room is rocking against the walls of the world while a lonely rooster walks the streets, wishing neither well, nor ill. Somewhere amongst them there is also a young artist from today, a woman fixing the walls and changing the bulbs in another room – another figure with the power to change plans and opinions. 

Why is it important at all, and what are all these characters doing here? A sickly, restless and most Spanish painter of all has managed to thicken darkness and elegance to a point where it distils into the dew of Western horror, settling even in the eye sockets of a bejewelled infanta. A little more time had to pass before the romantics made sure that feverish visions never leave our imagination, that every corner houses a pale witch's beast or a ghostly abyss. Today, dread and fright are extremely dramatic issues, like baroque jewellery. We know less about them than somebody's nannies or housemaids, but dream up nightmares nonetheless. 

When the nightmare is over, a journey over the country, which only sometimes unavoidably is, begins. That's where needs come up. A landscape stretches out, turning into a belt; stories unfold and lose their contours. All artists give in to that, because they have no choice – only a hand-drawn rift leads somewhere, only sand accumulating amongst pencil strokes settles into memory. They return silently, on the tips of their tongues, without waking up the painter or the palace girls, or the lovers with their hands intertwined, swaddled in snakes, wrapped in gestures which are not to be repeated come morning. 

The greatest horror is the daily weaving of worldview, until you turn into a spider in your own hair. Provocations and coincidences follow all, while Viktorija trusts fate, even that which is not her own, and welcomes it with no resistance. In the same way as she welcomes the shapes of things, unfamiliar streets and sketches perused in the evenings. A picture has a shape of its own – Goya knows that, too – and each frame is a tool of pure evil. Only artists and lovers are not afraid to touch that, to bend it, turn and draw it, pull spiders out of their hair and let them live in their rooms. They share the same copper-tinted blue blood, and use mythology for mischievous goals. 

And what about us? We see ourselves as films and never know what it's all about. Elegance consists of wonderful banalities: it is hard to tell apart life and journey, beauty and heat lives in windows, there is a non-wedding ring on my palm and we must dance, but only together. We spread further than any landscape, but wake up from Goya's nightmares alone and as children, sweating, looking up to roosters for help and grasping for solutions in the folds of fate.

Meanwhile, in Casablanca, only lovers survive – words and people from our universal imagination, which unavoidably are, but only together. 

© text Monika Kalinauskaitė, 2018