Ernest Zacharevic: How 'Everything Will Be Ok' So Long as We Keep Moving

With over two decades of experience as an artist, Zacharevic knew how daunting it was to relearn old lessons and open oneself up to new ones, especially when it came to showing their work to others. Art, for him, was never performative. In Vilnius, Lithuania, where he spent his formative years in a national arts school, the teachers would focus primarily on classical art techniques. Then, when he moved to London for a fine arts degree, the tutors there were practical in terms of how an art career worked. “Just make art and put it where people could see it,” was their advice for him.

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“Something that I’m learning to this day—which I still don’t feel comfortable with—is putting my work out there,” admits Zacharevic. “I never know when’s the right time to do it or what’s a good platform to show it. But I think the rule of thumb here is to keep making art and to keep showing it to people. Even if it doesn’t seem like it’s doing much, it’s not actually holding you back because you’re constantly practising.”

On the subject of social media and the pressure of posting, he sees it as one of the many ways an artist could put their work out there. While not an absolute necessity, he understands the hesitance of emerging artists when it came to the global platform. Too much of a response, and it gets overwhelming; too little, and it becomes underwhelming—which is one of the major factors as to why artists give up their careers. “Go past that [fear] and carry on producing,” Zacharevic advises. “No matter what happens, as long as you’re putting in the work and keep showing it to people, you’ll progress further.”

He did just that for ‘Everything Will Be OK’, his recent exhibition at RexKL. The artist confessed to having felt unmoored when his once tightly packed schedule suddenly freed up during the lockdown. The challenge then, he says, was having to get himself to do art in the first place without a particular end goal in mind. Today, it was the perpetual issue of creating art that resonated with both the viewer and the artist.

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“The challenges we face today in society and I face as an artist are two very different things,” he explains. “On one hand, the sociopolitical challenges are one of the major drivers for artists and are one of the things that inspire them to move forward and create. I feel that a lot of people are looking into art for comfort in difficult times—creators as well as the people who look at art.

“That’s why we see a lot of beautiful, dreamy art. It’s often a theme that’s used for people to take a break from reality and hardships. But as humans, we need art. It’s one of the biggest sources of comfort but it works the other way too; sometimes these harsh realities are easy to ignore and turn a blind eye to, so it’s up to artists to remind people of what’s happening in the world.”

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