‘I’m here!’ I shiver down the phone, pulling my coat tightly around my body. I’m standing outside of what appears to be an industrial estate near Clapham Junction, waiting for artist Vilté Fuller to rescue me from the cold. Seconds later, a tall figure waves as she approaches the gate, her blunt bob and oversized puffer jacket casting a striking silhouette against the darkening sky. She pushes a button and I slip through. Immediately chatting away, we make the trip across the car park, up an external flight of stairs and through a labyrinthine tangle of corridors before Vilté pushes open a door and we enter a brightly-lit rectangular unit.

​

‘That’s Ariane,’ she says, gesturing to the studio’s other occupant who is currently dancing away to a song blaring through her headphones as she applies paint to a large canvas. Exchanging ‘hellos’, I learn that this is the artist Ariane Heloise Hughes, Vilté’s studio mate and best friend, who is currently pulling an all-nighter to finish paintings for an upcoming solo show in Italy. After brief pleasantries, she gets back to it. Every minute counts when up against a deadline.

​

•••

​

In contrast to the cutting wind outside, the studio is hot, and it’s a relief when Vilté shows me where to hang my coat. Within moments she has launched into an explanation of her latest body of work, which she has just begun following the conclusion of her recent solo exhibition at Fitzrovia gallery, Brooke Benington.

​

We stand in front of a sheet of paper pinned to the wall. A loose sketch of two female figures comes into focus. I ask if this is how she typically starts her paintings. ‘I’ve never done it before,’ she admits with a laugh. ‘I don’t work on paper ever. I don’t even sketch.’ How does she usually begin, then? ‘I just come up with an image, collage or edit it on Photoshop and go straight for it. If it doesn’t work, I scrap it and start over.’ Repetition is part of her practice, and she will often make multiples of a single image before selecting the one she deems to be most successful.

​

•••​

​

For the past year and a half Vilté has had back-to-back shows, and my visit coincides with the first moment, in a long time, when she has had the opportunity to experiment, resulting in the sketch on paper before us. ‘I’m going to do things I couldn’t do before because of the time constraints,’ she explains. ‘I didn’t have time for things to go wrong, so I stuck with what I know but now I’m trying new things. This is my first ever full-figure situation.’ The drawing is based on a photograph of her grandmother taken in Soviet Lithuania. She is captured conducting an autopsy amidst a group of women training to be doctors. ‘So I’m going back to the old Lithuanian storytelling,’ she says with a laugh.

​

•••​

​

Vilté is perhaps best known for her fantastical painted vignettes in which distorted faces emerge from swirling, amorphous backgrounds. The ambiguous narratives fuse the aesthetics of cinematic horror with motifs drawn from Eastern European folklore, nodding to her early upbringing in Lithuania before her family relocated to England. Her recent exhibition at Brooke Benington marked a significant departure. 

Titled Corporate Horrors, she explored the allure of office culture (an outlook, I can’t help thinking, only possible for someone who makes their living outside of said conditions…). She introduced the compositional framework of a grid inspired by the geometrical facades of Brutalist office buildings, pixels and the square keys of computer keyboards, examples of which were also collaged to the canvases alongside work shirts and other examples of outdated office tech. Grey replaced the monochromatic green palette that had become her signature – a reference to the colour commonplace in ex-Soviet municipal buildings in Lithuania due to a surplus of paint originally intended for military vehicles.

​

She intends to retain the grid motif as she embarks on her new body of work but, untethered from the world of work, to synthesise it with a thematic return to her Lithuanian roots. She hopes the approach will allow her to slow down the painting process, to treat every square of the canvas with equal care, and consider more carefully the overall composition of each work.

​

•••​

​

We move over to a set of shelves jam-packed with the detritus that collects in a studio over time. Vitamin bottles are rammed in next to a jar of instant coffee (the studio staple for all artists, it seems), a pair of green plastic crabs locked in battle and a green figure of a fleshy torso, alongside a number of small paintings. The danger of predominantly painting in a green palette is, undoubtedly, the inevitable impact it has on the gifts you receive. ‘I mean anything green people get for you!’ she exclaims. ‘Is that why you moved away from the green?’ I ask. ‘You’d had enough?’ Vilté says nothing but a knowing smile plays across her face.

​

•••​

​

As Vilté fiddles with the plastic crabs, we discuss the complexities faced by emerging artists as they attempt to establish a recognisable, signature style while sustaining room for evolution in their practice. ‘I was fortunate because I started showing my works quite early. I was 23, maybe?’ she says. ‘But I look back now, and I think I needed a few more years before I started putting my stuff out there.’

 

Thinking of the deep dive I did into her work before I arrived at her studio, I ask, ‘do you not like that some of that very early work is out there if people look for it?’ She nods, ‘but saying that, I can’t really complain, it’s all part of the journey. But if I wanted to have a perfectly curated timeline, I think I needed a few more years. I didn’t know what I was doing then.’ I think of the artists pre-internet who destroyed vast bodies of work that they deemed to be unsatisfactory – think Claude Monet and a disappointing group of waterlilies or Georgia O’Keeffe’s careful purges throughout her career. It’s certainly harder for artists working today with their digital footprint ever visible over their shoulder.

 

I wonder if Vilté feels a sense of certainty now? She nods, albeit with some hesitation as she shifts her weight from one leg to another. ‘I do. But I’m not very good at sticking to something just because it’s working,’ she concedes. ‘Maybe I should be, but my worst fear is being bored.’ Consequently, she treats each show as a distinct project with a new set of parameters and possibilities. ‘There’s other formulas to being an artist, rather than having a gradual transition in your style.’ Turning her finger towards her chest with great enthusiasm she exclaims, ‘Me! I’m the continuity. If my work looks a bit different from show to show, that’s fine. It’s still me!’

•••

​

Evidence of her enthusiastically experimental approach is scattered across the studio. From an old painting of rotting cherries (‘maybe I’ll paint them again really large’) to airbrush samples (‘a failed experiment’) and an illustration of the iconic ‘Potatoes and Dill’ t-shirt she designed in 2022 featuring two ‘babushka style old women’ and still available to purchase online.

 

This improvisational attitude might be an essential aspect of her painting practice today, but it has pragmatic origins. Starting out, she was unable to afford prepared canvases, so she sewed together fabric remnants and stretched them over bars made from bits of wood bought at B&Q. ‘I still sew canvases together sometimes,’ she says, telling me of the delight she takes in sewing scraps of cloth or clothing with particular meaning into her works. It’s certainly one way to make use of an ex-boyfriend’s shirt and perhaps even more gratifying if the painting sells…

​

•••

​

However, it’s another experiment that first drew me to Vilté’s work. Her paintings often have these rough, uneven edges – almost as if they are frescoes cut out and lifted from a plastered wall. When I ask how she achieves this texture, she retrieves a small white tub from a shelf. As she pops off the lid my nostrils are immediately hit with the smell of pure alcohol. ‘It’s beeswax in white spirit,’ she explains.

 

Grabbing a palette knife, she scoops out a chunk of the semi-opaque, whitish substance and presses it onto a palette where it is mixed with a small amount of paint. The now pigmented medium is applied to the edge of a work-in-progress in two deft sweeps, building up a pitted texture that extends beyond the borders of the canvas. What inspired the innovation? ‘I feel it slightly corrupts the surface and that makes it easier to paint,’ she states simply. I nod, peering into the tub of Vaseline-esque substance. We all find our own remedies to overcome the anxiety of laying down the first marks.

​

••• 

 

Conscious of keeping Vilté late at the studio, I go to leave, but not before I’ve been introduced to her ever-expanding exotic chilli farm happily growing away on the window ledge above her desk. I’m curious, for someone who embraces reinvention, what’s next? Following a trip to South East Asia, for which she has primed several notepads ready to be filled with sketches for future paintings, she wants to try something new – this time with Ariane. ‘We’re thinking of making a body of work together called We Failed the Bechdel Test,’ she laughs. ‘As friends, what do we talk about the most? And, unfortunately, it’s boys. So let’s explore that…'

​

••• 

 

With a final goodbye, I’m back out in the cold. I walk briskly towards the tube, avoiding the groups of flat-cap-wearing, vape-sucking young men gathered outside of the bars, gillets zipped tightly against the chilling wind. Released from the whirlwind of Vilté’s seemingly unlimited energy, I head home, left thinking about exotic chillies, the challenges of collaboration and celebrating change.

​

​

​

Kitty Gurnos-Davies

5 February 2024

​