Tomorrow never comes - I don’t want to attempt to explain the paradox thats embedded in this idiom. One of the reasons I wanted to create this work is because it is impossible to position it into good/bad or positive/negative categories. It elegantly defies this kind of dualistic categorization and that is exactly what I am after in my work. I think it is a subversive text, it functions like a Zen koan - it is aimed to provoke the mind out of the beaten path and to trigger the process of awakening. It attempts to address our perception of time and somewhere there between the rational analysis and spontaneous perception lies a glimpse into... immortality - or at least a form of it thats accessible to a human being - the state of being in the perpetual, eternal today.

However, it is not just a conceptual text work, it is a light sculpture that references such phenomena as Hollywood and its cinematic fictions and the glitz of Las Vegas (but only as seen from a distance). Also, it invokes such American artists as Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman, whose text works have explored American landscape and its metaphysics, but from the perspective of certain irony and melancholy that raises from the land that’s exploited and trivialized.

The way this object is made - the glowing mess of the old fashioned fluorescent light bulbs assembled in a seemingly clumsy and obsessive way talks about some dystopian reality and suggests an attempt at recreating something from an idealized past… And this invokes a particular character that has come out of Hollywood fictions - Max Rochatansky of the post apocalyptic world of Mad Max and the visionary survivalism, brutality and deep (and imperfect) humanity that this character embodies. I want to apply the same characteristics in order to describe this artwork.

- Text by Artūrs Virtmanis

Artūrs Virtmanis (1971) is an artist who has been living and working between New York and Rīga for more than twenty years now. His works are characterized by a philosophically poetic quality and existentialism, creating an environment that’s dense both visually and metaphorically – outdoor artworks of wispy charcoal drawings, which combine sentimental picture relics from times long past with undecipherable calligraphic writing, graphic codes and ciphers, collections of found objects, architecture mockups and artefacts collected while making the work. His creative practice is characterized by fragile large-scale installations that combine graphic charcoal drawings and elements of space design, often revealing topics such as entropy, science fiction, utopia, melancholia and messianism. He studied art and design at the Rīga Art and Design Secondary School (1990) and went on to study sculpture at the Art Academy of Latvia (1996).