Vilte Fuller makes paintings that draw on her influences that include her Lithuanian background, Eastern European foodstuffs, Korean cinema, Chinese jade sculptures and aliens, amongst other things. She creates a distinctive visual landscape, each individual painting seems to be a small vignette of a larger whole with recurring characters, landscape and motifs. The paintings might be seen as stills from a film (most likely a disaster movie), except that they are very insistent on their status as paintings, using different textures on the canvas and differing scales
Fuller (b. 1996) moved from Lithuania to Kent as a child where she grew up in the heartlands of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) during its heyday in the early to mid 2010s. The rhetoric of UKIP was specifically virulently anti-East European, to create an environment that was a combination of low-level hostility and tedium. During and just after art school in Glasgow, Fuller however grew increasingly interested in her Lithuanian cultural background, in part encouraged by the realisation that not all constituencies subscribed to the views of UKIP. In the creative industries, fashion brands like Balenciaga and Vetements under the creative direction of Georgian-born Demna Gvasalia were exploring a post-Soviet aesthetic. Brutalism was being positively reassessed.
Fuller's interest in how her Lithuanian background might provide the foundation for her paintings was furthered by looking back at photographs taken by her two grandfathers, one an engineer who set up a dark room in the family flat, the other a professional photographer and editor-in-chief of the Klaipeda newspaper. These source images provided background patterns, people's faces and images of food items that fed into her paintings. The role of food is particularly important in Fuller's work. The rise of Eastern European foodshops in Britain, such as Lituanica, were a visible signifier of the growing presence of Eastern Europeans in the country, to the distaste of Brexiteers in particular. In Fuller's paintings, East European food plays a central and affirmative role. Characters hold packaged foods, have thick sauces being poured over or around them, hold or even merge into green pickles. The title of the show is a nod to the once humble bone broth that has now been repackaged for upmarket delis.
There is an assertion of cultural identity here, albeit one that is done with a knowing, melancholic wink. One might even say that Fuller's paintings are an ambiguous mix of uneasiness and perhaps a sort of assertive nostalgia. She has talked about how the predominance of chromium oxide green in recent works is in part because it is almost exactly the same shade of the former KGB prison walls in Vilnius. Yet the characters who inhabit these paintings have a sense of old-world glamour about them and seem if not overjoyed at their surroundings, then at least resigned to them. A suited man thoughtfully lights a cigarette; another looks back at the viewer impassively whilst a jar of ketchup is upended in the foreground. They sometimes morph into the background or into each other, dissolving before us back into the half-remembered dreams they emerged from. Fuller's works speak of a dystopian present where (presciently given the current times, danger seems to lurk just around the corner). These are landscapes of post-Soviet architecture, of domestic objects, food and characters who seem trapped in scenes that might not end well. They are scenes that suggest that cultural belonging might not always produce peaceful or good outcomes, but is still worth holding onto come what may.