A Companion piece (Purple moves)

Site-specific window painting, size variable

“Ruscica’s site-specific mural Companion Piece (Purple moves) takes over the arched windows with a continuous amaranthine and plasmatic line. The painting on glass is drafted in a deviant script, a polymorphic and disfigured alphabet. Stretched up and down the windows with an italicised slant, the scrawl is reminiscent of asemic writing, a communication before and beyond the specificity of language, in between distinctions of signal and noise, seeing and reading, and outside comprehension.

By teasing legibility, Ruscica restores to writing an almost primordial expressive and semantic potential, while turning the act of perception and reading into a playful riddle with no fixed rules. Through a process of fluid transformation, the line evolves from a freehand artistic gesture into an abstract mark, a letter, or a recognisable figure – a Scottish Terrier raising its snout as if trying to escape the drawing.

The artist Paul Klee famously described the line as ‘a dot that went for a walk’, and the movement of the eye as it follows the line is at one with the movement of the line itself, immersed in a mode of sensory thought that precedes the logical separation of subject and object. The line is both graphic representation and gesture, image and inscription, a statement of intent occupying the interval where marks become information, where forms mingle and meanings slip. The framework of the windows provides a rigid structure for the chaotic scribble to transgress, yet it also cuts and segments the line’s path. Like how individual frames work in animation, the fragmentary motion nevertheless coalesces.

Filtering the transparent threshold between inside and out, the painting is also a projection device. As sunlight streams through the windows throughout the day, it generates an ever-changing theater of colour and distortion, reshaping the perception of space and other artworks in the exhibition, highlighting the experience of time’s passage and fragility of the moment.”

written by Post Brothers for the catalogue of the group exhibition ‘Breaking the Joints’ at Sapieha Palace, Vilnius