Grudzinskas possess and deploys a wide range of painterly techniques, with his work displaying a quiet tension between positive and negative gestures - between movements loaded with media spread across the painting's surface, and differing processes of erasure and removal. Playing off diametrically opposed values is further continued in contrasting flatness and depth, and diffuse sprays with crisp lines, which is heightened through a limited, almost monochromic, palette. Through these various procedures of application and cancellation, Grudzinskas’ liminal traces mirror the aesthetic and experience of contemporary urbanity. 

Like a graffiti-filled city wall that has been sprayed, buffed, tagged and plastered with posters and all manner of paraphernalia ad infinitum, Grudzinskas’ paintings are almost geological in their accretion of conflicting and contradictory traces of the artist’s presence, through mediated gestures that initially appear somewhat removed from ‘painting’ and the ‘hand of the artist’. Creation, destruction, entropy and a harmonious disequilibrium are defining characteristics of Grudzinskas’ paintings. His paintings are defined as much by what they are not, and what they hold back, as much as what they are - what they reveal and hide from the viewer.

Ziggy Grudzinskas - Cognitive Dissonance
Tristian Koenig, June 2 - July 2
www.tristiankoenig.com