Fewer people know that Lankauskas was a master not only of the pen, but also of the brush. Starting his career as an artist in the early 1960s, he was one of the earliest and most consistent representatives of abstract expressionism in Lithuania. The artist (who, by the way, was one of the first to paint with acrylics in our country) admitted that his teachers in Europe, America, Japan and the United States had been his teachers; museums and galleries, as well as art albums, he created his first abstract works in 1961, after a visit to the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris and after having seen the masterpieces of classical modernism (Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Joan Miró) in person. In Soviet times, this was a bold challenge to the totalitarian system. A dozen years ago, Lankauskas himself said, "My exposure to art has lasted more than forty-five years. Since I painted abstract compositions without the slightest study (it was hopeless to get one during the Soviet era), and it was absolutely impossible to take part in exhibitions blessed by the government, I didn't even try to get into them when abstract art was declared an 'ideological diversion' by the Communist Party's ideologues. And that sounded like a rather ominous warning... <...> The Party was well aware that art was a dangerous thing. It liberates man and his spirit". And during the period of independence, abstract vision and thinking continued to be consistently developed as a conscious stance against total consumerism and incipient conformism.
The artist was primarily concerned with the problems of form and colour. Lankauskas's visual expression is characterised by the rhythmic rhythm of jazz music, which he has described on several occasions, by the spontaneous and gestural colour combinations of lines and blotches, brushstrokes and strokes, and by the improvisatory nature of the construction of compositional structures. "Abandoning figurativeness, abstraction loses nothing, it truly expands the limits of the painter's possibilities. However, it does not belong to fine art, as it does not represent, but only expresses various things - worldview, mood, spiritual state, existential concept of being and similar phenomena," says the artist.

For the first time in the exhibition halls of the Vilnius Academy of Arts "Titanikas" there is an attempt to present the abundant and diverse legacy of visual art of R. Lankauskas. It is a retrospective of sorts, introducing viewers to the artist's paintings, works on paper, drawings, collages and objects. The exhibition is structured chronologically (from the earliest and earliest works to the late and latest) and thematically (revealing the main themes and sources of inspiration).