PAVLA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

In my past lives, I was a hunter and a gatherer. I would always start my everyday routine
with decorating tools, weapons and creating musical instruments for myself.
 
1) Even though you were considered as the creator of spatial objects, in this exhibition your major emphasis is on paintings. What was the impulse?

The new atelier, where for the first time in my life, is light, space and warmth, this helped me to finally start painting. An eternity of horizons was open in front of me, together with two big travels to Columbia and Australia, I understand this happy season as staying on an abandoned island, therefore the name "Two years’ vacation".
 
2) In 2004 you painted large format canvases "Roads of swifts" and "Mother Earth". In the sametime frame you also painted "Chaple of Karlin", and even before that, "Envelopes" were created, therefore in your own way you are continuing with something that was created long before?  

Of course, I was already painting in the '70s during my studies. Back then I inherited very rare pigments from prof. Slánský, which I am using presently. The first time I used them was during my exhibition in Rudolfinum, when there was a need to paint something great for "Silent Hall" and a figure of the central deity arose, which is appearing in my works in different varieties. Connection with the material was always important for me. The type of work on the ground on the non-gesso canvas, together with water diluted pigments and acrylate bonds demanded this physical contact. Even in some places on the paintings, there are my footprints.

A wall painting "Chaple of Karlin" was in somewhat a cleansing exhibition after the floods in 2002, and according to an agreement I had to turn it white. The oldest envelopes date back to 1986. The style of their decoration is connected with the style of "Third rococo" and that epoch is accumulated in my works. In the '90s I created multiple large format envelopes, which I perceived as the object/pictures having multiple-meanings and it opened an inexhaustible line packed into certain cushions, similar to guitars. This is related to my favourite non-standard formats (ovals) and adjusting large canvasses "free" without the stretcher bar.
 
3) What was most interesting thing about Australia? 

First of all never ending space and starry skies. Five weeks, every evening by the fire in the desert. Furthermore, colours and rock paintings as old as 60 000 years. This was the first time I have seen baobabs and eucalypti that were 800 years old, which existed way before the arrival of whites... breathtaking scenery. I brought back a lot of collected materials and natural clay, with which I am painting. Australians have a "story" for each god, they are mostly cautionary stories, which have helped to keep the tribes viable. It appears to me as there are various imaginary divinities, however, they were born from the transcultural backdrop. Something interesting is that the rock paintings and figures on it are very similar all around the world, but I am not the type who would study these things in much detail. On the other hand, I deliberately keep certain blindness, to be astonished, and I would recommend this to consumers. Those who ask too much will learn too much.

4) Some rusty images look a bit apocalyptic, did it have any specific impulse?

"Rusty images" are painted by some rusty mud from a forested swamp in West Czech. In fact, they are ferric nano-shells of microorganisms. I discovered this beautiful colour in the '70s, which came back to me now, to extract it artistically. Thematically, they partly follow the cycle of thermo-drawings "Landscapes from Timelessness" or the cycle of graphics "Giants", where the power of nature is personified into supernatural beings. People desire to witness a miracle or other paranormal acts, and we have this advantage that we can also paint them. Also, people are drawn to the aesthetic of natural disasters and the theatre of extinction. Towards the end however, the road took me elsewhere.
 
5) When you were in Columbia, did you try yagé -the most renowned shamanic hallucinogen?

I don’t need to check what I suspect. I don't need to meet God. I don't want to upset him. He
could stop passing me.
 
The interview led Miroslav Ambroz

PAVLA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

27.09.2014 - 13.11.2014

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
27/9 – 13/11/2014
Opening: 25/9/2014 at 7pm
Curator: Jan Zálešák

How many things that surround us do we really understand? But we can still use them, touch them, speak to them, put them into motion. This deep, while unconscious understanding that seems to be inscribed in the motions and that is build by motions, touches and gestures, takes an important place in the work of Pavla Sceranková.

In the early stages of her career, Pavla Sceranková was searching for ways to "animate" - how to depict or categorize movement - while remaining in the area of sculpture or object creation. An example result of this search are the objects from the cycle Memory as a new reality (2006). A slightly different approach has been used in a more recent series of objects Yes or No (2010). Items that we well know as silent partners in our rooms and kitchens (lamp, porcelain dinner service) seem to explode in front of us, but just before the fractions have managed to fly in all directions, someone pressed the PAUSE button. In addition to works in which the motion remains only a kind of unfinished option Sceranková also creates sculptures and objects, that the audience can touch, and therefore they can not only by looking, but also by moving update the contents that are placed in them.

The installation in the Fait Gallery MEM is loosely based on the author's exhibitions Woman on the Moon (Old Town Hall GHMP, 2013) and Constellation (Atrium MG in Brno, 2013). In both she was searching for ways to expand the dimensions of the viewer's experience and understanding tied to personal and physical experience of a metaphorical move in the universe. Great and for the vast majority of people a truly unimaginable size of the world "out there" in these exhibitions formed a counterpoint to the "small" human experience again based in "small", familiar subjects.

The form of the installation in the MEM gallery was significantly influenced by meetings with Dr. Bruno Jungwiert from the Galaxies department at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Discussions with an expert on the dynamics and the evolution of galaxies brought Pavla Sceranková to a key theme of the exhibition, which is the collision of galaxies. In order to appreciate the drama of this event, we must be able to think in scales and in time periods that almost exceed our imagination. If the human observer was inside such a collision, he would not, because of the vast distances between (potentially) conflicting elements, notice anything at all.

This paradox intrigued the author and the desire to let the audience literally enter into the colliding structures became the starting point in the design of the exhibition. The symbolic move into intergalactic space is, on the material level of the installations, connected with the intimate space of the kitchen or the dining room - the space, which, aside from the already somehow outdated cultural stereotype characterising it as a purely female area, is primarily a family space, a space of harmony, but also an arena of conflicts and battles. If we put a piece of saucer or pot mounted to the end of the rotatable structure into motion, we risk a real crash and also animate a model of the universe. Therefore there is a crash of not only incommensurable formats, but also incommensurable time dimensions. The human time in which we are born, die, fall in love and hold deep hate is, in the context of "space-time" of a galactic collision, completely worthless. But maybe the opposite is also true, when a scientific version of the absolute crumbles under emotions, that may be put into a motion by a piece of rotating kitschy chinoiserie...

Jan Zálešák

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