LUCIA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

The most remarkable, for some perhaps somewhat old-fashioned but at the same time unusually topical aspect of Lenka Vítková's work is its emblematic nature. However, not in the art-history sense of the word when an image is directly linked with a text in a single sign unit which contains a gnomic title, allegorical representation and an epigram revealing the meaning of the enigmatic title and the even more enigmatic representation. In her case, the emblem is more appropriately understood as a metaphor for a variety of rather personal tactics and artistic strategies in uncovering meaning by obscuring it, and a multifaceted manifestation of the unity of poetry and image.

It is therefore not a literary extension of a work of art, or, conversely, of the imagery of texts but, first and foremost, a condensation of lived experience that allows the artist to perform meaning through a multi-directional exchange between the seen, the thought and the written, an exchange conducted through words, a spatial intervention, sound or moving image, a painterly gesture or the selection and processing of a specific material - in recent years, for example, plaster, which is not just the basis for painting etudes but also comes into play as a visually and haptically active thing-sign. The title of Lenka Vítková's current exhibition and the accompanying publication, First Book of Emblems, is therefore an explicit acknowledgement of the principle of her creative practice, as well as the artist’s suggestion of how the viewer (and the reader) could approach them.

Waving, circling, approaching and receding, leaning, walking, falling. Transformation. A meaning created by the movement of words and the action of the painted surface, by an image related to a sentence. A meaning emerging from the image following a sentence, from a sound or film sequence as a transposition of a word or image. Lenka Vítková's approach to her work is typified by a special kind of civility and ability to speak for herself in relation to the emerging whole of the world through subjects whose prospective banality is cancelled not only by the mentioned emblematic nature but in recent years predominantly by working on the painting, painting as a still-effective way of showing what I mean. Clues which are obviously distilled starting points include not only signs, abstract patterns and abstracted realities or objects and configurations of the seen - glimpsed, but also objects, body fragments and figures. Yet it is always about the whole. Indeed, the subtle objectivity of the subject with which Lenka Vítková is currently working is accompanied at every step by her ability to share much broader contexts, more like a condition than an explanation of the present ones, which make the choice even more significant. Or, last but not least, there is that unsentimental way in which the artist, through painterly means, lays out and activates the surface in order to keep in play the affective qualities of the creative process and their sources.

If Lenka Vítková's works and exhibitions sometimes make the sympathetic viewer feel slightly dizzy, it is due to the continuous stream of exchange between seeing and intellectual work. Her art (she is an exceptional colourist among painters of her generation and beyond) amplifies and intensifies the feeling of the viewer's physical presence in front of the painting or in its space, while at the same time giving meaning to the actual experience that the recipient is undergoing in a difficult-to-convey state of consciousness. One aspect of this type of artistic experience (emphasized by the tradition of modernism) is the result of long-standing exercises through which we still, albeit rarely, and then with a certain suspicion that we are definitely missing something, master the dialectical relationship in which the self and the universe, immediacy and mediation, subjectivity and impersonality, or tradition and its unique fulfilment, can be found. Although we can speculate about what the postmodern emancipation of the sign universe has made possible for the artist and which line of modernist subjective universalism she may be following, the artist herself has described her art practice most accurately: “I’m coming,/ don't know what I’m bringing./ I’ll start somewhere,/ I’ll do something somehow./ Some things the material will do on its own. The gestures I own.”

Text: Marek Pokorný

The project was financially supported by the City of Brno and Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

LUCIA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

15.10.2014 - 05.12.2014

Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Dominican Square 10, Brno
15/10 – 5/12/2014
Opening: 14/10/2014 at 6pm
Curator: Martin Nytra

THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

The work of Lucie Sceranková is characterised by its emphasis on our perception of photography as a means of exploring the possible forms of reality. Despite, or may be just because of this approach, the reality seems to be relative, variable, or it‘s stable definitive form becomes unattainable. Rather than a print of the reality out of flesh and bones, photography acts today as a technology that creates an autonomous reality, that can do anything with the landscape of rocks and seas. Distinguishable, subjective "me" entered the picture and merged with it in a dream, in which version the world is only a plane of projection of fantasies.

The principal topics of photography, time and movement, are categories that despite the desire to penetrate into their essence only reveal in every next step the imperfection of any, even an intensive attempt for their absolute definition. The image about our own identity that, in comparison with the dimensions of the universe, becomes a subject of a significant disparity. This feature of her work with scale is one of the important means for Sceranková’s work, by which the author copes with her own experience of reality. She translates that into more broadly conceived themes to which the audience can relate through metaphorical depictions and a play with associations. However, it still leaves the audience plenty of space to search for their own interpretations. The personal experience is in the principle non-transferable, but it can be equated. The model, which creates specific conditions for the perception is therefore one of the other important points in the author's reflections about the nature of the world, that can be viewed only through schemes that put us into certain discursive and cultural contexts.

The image of Sceranková’s concept stands on the edge of the area and space where we are only able to recognise familiar and understandable forms, which we try to reach and attach to them as to the way in the belief that at the very end we will get the meaning. Clever work with archetypes and the surreal visions, that works with the psychology of the audience, eventually turns our attention to the reflection of visual culture and the traditional models for reading of the images and also current changes in the understanding of the subjective self in environments of archives of shared memory and language.

Martin Nytra

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