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The article analyses the posthumous exhibition of the painter Algis Skačkauskas, in which paintings are accompanied by various poetic texts creating an unexpected dialectic between image and word. This provides an invaluable opportunity to research different ways in which paintings can create narrative sequences and words can relate to paintings. Even though the semiotic method seems to provide the necessary instruments for such a task, the article presents criticism of the method, which proposes to consider text as an open structure of possibilities and encourages to explore relations between verbal and visual discourse without limiting them to similarity or cooperation. It is assumed that exhibition can be perceived as a text, i.e. a coherent whole belonging to a specific discourse. The article argues that rhythmically recurring image sequences define the exhibition space as a space of tensions and, as a consequence, these tensions constitute abstract transformations from one sequence towards another. Poetic texts, unlike the sequences of painting, do not form any particular coherent narrative. Instead, they transform and enrich the figurative level of paintings providing the perceiver with new ways of navigating and reading the exhibition. What the analysis reveals is that the spatial arrangement can enhance the perception of visual discourse as well as reinforce the gap between the visual and written. At the same time due to its inconsistency and equivocal nature the poetic discourse points to different models of reading visual discourse and eliminates the possibility of having one stable interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]