A decade of energetic activity enabled Israildžonas and Andželika Baroti to rally together artists and potential buyers, and not only major local artists, but also initiated the buying and selling of classic works of Lithuanian art. Until then, to be open and honest, no one was doing this in Klaipėda.

The gallery's philosophy of main stream “Lithuanian quiet modernism” and its abstention from more radical and excessive styles of art should not surprise. Klaipėda was and still is, according to one poet, a calm city of “long things”, enbankments canals and quays. Time, they say, is long and wide here. A cigarette here lasts longer than in the capital; love stories are also many-tomed. And it seems the cult of classic easel paintings will not be moved by the winds of artistic fashion. Here, The Beatles' "Fool On the Hill” is not only an ideal of the local sparklet poets, but also a symbol of the fear of unavoidable decisions, dictated by the strategies of everyday collaboration. To be alive and active as if time has deliberately stopped, could be the motto of Baroti gallery. Baroti gallery is a living exhibit in the coastal aquarium of art this “spermatosaur” of art is worthy of attention by the Marine and Zoological museums alike.

I remember well its first spaces - a fachwerk tangle with spy-hole windows in the so-called “artists' house without art”; later, three rooms hardly an arm's reach across. Goodness! how much was proclaimed from that hill; how much cheap wine was absorbed; how much bellowing (even if under our breaths!). What passions were seen and repressed! What well tuned and absolutely disharmonic people were seen! And how many of them Albertas Stankevičius, Vaidotas Daunys and even Raimis Urbonas and other less known but charming lost souls we shall never see again! All they were passengers aboard the gallery's space-time spaceship, leaving their glowing trajectories of cigarettes and their pipe-smoke in the UFO-filled spaces of our untrustworthy mosaic minds.

And the ship is sailing…

I wish it favourable winds excellent exhibitions and loyal clients and their attendant ladies. May there be no darkening of negotiations with dealers and clients by compromising on cheap prices or even worse cheap tastes! Let the paintings and sculptures look at us with the final judgement. Let both sides recognise one another. For, as another poet said, “there is only one witness art, which enlightens a midwinter's night”

Rolandas Rastauskas