2025 Finalists

The technological and information revolution has activated hybrid transformations of spirituality. In his book Techgnosis, Erik Davis writes of an “electric fire,” a primordial light that permeates matter and animates it. This light is not merely an optical event but a fluid, spiritual substance hidden within the core of technology itself – a substance that binds spirit and matter.

To think and paint light is inseparable from the tradition of painting itself. As the anniversary of Lithuanian classic M.K. Čiurlionis passes, I reflect on his visions of cosmic light and landscapes as thresholds between material and spiritual dimensions. Against this background, another echo emerges from contemporary culture: the 2008 video game The Void (Ice-Pick Lodge), where color is not simply pigment but life force. In that monochrome world, color appears as a membrane, a lymph-like substance flowing through bodies and environments. To lose color is to lose vitality; without it, one simply dies.

The diptych unfolds in this atmosphere – like sunset and inferno at once – embodying a mood of apocalyptic anxiety. The surface is saturated with crimson tones and layered contexts: a spectral angel-flower remade from the enigmatic Voynich manuscript. This mysterious pre-Renaissance codex, discovered in 1912 by the Polish-Lithuanian antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich, is filled with illustrations of unearthly plants. Alongside it appears the fragile wire fence borrowed from the aforementioned video game The Void, and the faint apparition of an AI-generated wolf, flickering between vision and machine dream.

This layering recalls the process of transillumination used in painting restoration, where ultraviolet light reveals what lies hidden beneath the surface – dead layers glowing in fluorescent reds, greens, and blues. Here, too, light acts as revelation, exposing the strata of images, histories, and half-forgotten myths embedded in the painted field.

(24/25)