‘City. A Different Angle’ is radically meaningless photography. These prints do not have any purport or function; they cannot be tailored to our everyday life. One could even say that nowadays this cycle is a very rare example of ‘art for art’s sake’ and that there was no need to create a whole cycle – one photograph and a description of how the other prints would look like would suffice. Again, we have a case of classic conceptualism, an artform which has very often settled with a description of an idea without any attempt to carry it through. However, one has to remember that the best works of classic conceptualism have always raised such fundamental questions about the prevailing system of that time, such as its legality, the validity of the socially accepted and so painfully familiar rules of life, various social relationships (man-to-man, man-to-an object, object-to-an object). Trimakas’ prints speak about a man that from the point of view of the modern func-tional world is engaged in absolutely meaningless activities. Of course, we are all engaged in similar activities – we go to work, we take the dog for a walk, or just take a stroll in the park. These activities are inevitable but in our overly meaningful and functional world they are just meaningless pauses between majestic periods of consumption and buying. Our frugal world strives to shorten those pauses to a maximum; therefore even our parks are crammed with various amusement machines, stalls selling ice cream, newspapers and magazines. Even there we are hunted by SMS messages or discarded logos in garbage bins. Therefore, it becomes heated when somebody openly proclaims that those pauses, squeezed from all sides, are our real life. Trimakas’ cycle is devoted to those pauses. He does not only capture them. He preserves them leaving everything else behind the margins. He disregards the predominant imperatives of the commercial logic of an image. He shows the world from a different angle – an angle that we often unwillingly forget as it is choked by powerful imagery. Trimakas does not aspire to become a new revolutionary, but he reminds us that there are sanctuaries, virgin lands where we are not assailed by commercial ads or pushy agents. Places where you can do what you want to, where you can create your own rules, speak incoherently or mysteriously, forget the time and disregard the newest dress code. (text by Jonas Valatkevičius)
