For Žilvinas Kempinas, like the Baroque artists before him, the classical column is a vehicle through which to express not only social concerns of the time but also a way to destabilise fixed perspectives. In Baroque architecture, columns were not merely balanced and orderly structural supports, as they had been in the Renaissance, but become instead expressive elements that could suggests worlds of infinity. Directing the viewer’s gaze ever upward, columns symbolised divine aspiration and the power of faith or the monarchy. Baroque columns – of which artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s St. Peter’s Baldachin 1623–34, in Vatican City, Rome, is the consummate example – are often spiralled or clustered, creating a sense of energy, rhythm and illusory space.

Kempinas’s contemporary Columns similarly transform this architectural feature into an immersive experience. Using magnetic video tape, he replaces marble solidity with fragility, raising questions about the spectre of technological obsolescence in a consumer-driven world perpetually seeking the new. This work engages light, space and the viewer’s own movement, echoing the Baroque fascination with optical play, ephemerality and spectacle. Like the artists and architects of the period, Kempinas means to manipulate the viewer’s perception: his columns appear to hover and dissolve, eroding the distinction between the viewer’s space and pictorial space.