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For several years now, Linas Kaziulionis has been investigating the logic of disinformation and conspiracy theories – how they take shape, why they spread, and why we believe them. His earlier work centered on a fictional chemical compound said to act on human thought through food, rendering us easier to control. This new series turns to the rituals of play – the places and ways in which people relax, and, in the same breath, make decisions of consequence.
„The Deal-Making Game” is a series of paintings about a game – golf – as a space of power. It is a slow, disciplined pursuit demanding total concentration. Formally, nothing happens: a ball, a few strokes, grass. Which is precisely why it has become the ideal venue for conversations not everyone is meant to overhear. Deals, alliances, informal understandings among people whose friendships cost more than private jets. The game is at once an instrument of power and a respite from it – and in both guises, a distinctly human need for which there is no substitute. In Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga argued that play is the primal wellspring of culture, predating even art or religion. Ritualized games – from the Olympics to a hand of cards – have always been more than entertainment; they have served as a way to make decisions without formal protocol and to draw hierarchies without public declaration. Golf, a favorite pastime of American presidents across the decades, has long provided an unimpeachable backdrop for plotting new world orders. The bitter irony is that one plays, and talks of new acts of war, as though it were all just a game.
Kaziulionis himself plays golf – a fact worth bearing in mind when looking at his work. He is no ironic observer standing apart from his subject. The artist knows his way around a bag of clubs and a string of holes as well as anyone; he, too, finds his repose in the very places where others broker new alliances or billion-dollar deals. In this exhibition, the painter invites viewers into a stage-set space – to feel grass underfoot, to count off the mystical eighteen balls, and to meet themselves, in the mirrored reflections, as players. Golf is a fine reminder that competing with others is ultimately beside the point; the only route to success runs through concentration on one’s own hole – one’s own target.
In Kaziulionis’s paintings, golf becomes a space of power: at once an incubator of disinformation and a territory of calm, where the world-weary can pause, recharge, and play again. It is not a place of contradiction but a reality in which everything happens at once. Across the „Deal-Making Game” cycle, Kaziulionis returns to his favorite questions: who really runs the world’s game, and do we even know that we’re playing in it?
– Ornela Ramašauskaitė, art market expert, artXchange Global
Linas Kaziulionis (b. 1993) is a painter and street artist, a graduate of the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts (VDA) with a master’s degree, and winner of the 2022 prize for Best Young Baltic Painter. He has held solo exhibitions in Lithuania (Vilnius Town Hall, Pamėnkalnis Gallery, Tumas Gallery, Trakai Vokė Manor) and abroad – the Čiurlionis Gallery in Chicago (USA), H-Gallery in Paris (France), SLA Gallery in New York (USA), and the EU Representation in Brussels (Belgium) – and has taken part in group exhibitions in Japan, Iceland, Belgium, and elsewhere. Kaziulionis is equally at home on canvas, where he is valued for his distinctive, vivid painting style, masterful command of color, and incisive subject matter, as he is working in large-scale mural drawing.
