Photo © Anna Pleslová

J Squared

The summer August exhibition at the Spot Gallery presents a selection of works by two recent graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague – Jitka Petrášová (1981) and Jolana Škachová (1998). Thesis projects are usually a moment of taking stock of one's studies so far, as well as a significant turning point in both artistic practice and life in general. The interface between the completed school and the beginning of professional practice is separated by the "last summer holidays"—a period of accelerated personal transformation. Within it, many concurrent, contradictory processes take place, awakening rapid successions of melancholic states and insistent promises; a transformation in which the sweet timelessness vanishes. One horizon closes only for another to open. This process of taking stock is also evident in the themes and subject matter appearing in the paintings and drawings of both artists. The work of Jitka Petrášová and Jolana Škachová is different in many ways: vitally exuberant, colorful paintings stand alongside muted, drawn, temporally layered images; introspective probes into ancestral history next to explorations of the ambiguous interface between static objectivity and the dynamic experience of time and space.

While to Jitka Petrášová the world appears as an enchanting, exotic garden—where, however, one can stumble upon shadowy corners full of absurd distortions, grotesque anomalies, and poisonous vegetation that disturb the clarity of the mind—Jolana Škachová immerses herself with deep concentration into the interspace of vision and perception, capitalizing on it through a newly discovered dream morphology. For Petrášová, the "garden" is a metaphor for both family and social community, where the traces and imprints of previous generations, tied to specific places and times, overlap. Škachová, on the other hand, sees the equivalent of "home" in her emerging imagination (much like the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor W. Adorno found his "home" in writing and language). Jitka Petrášová possesses a gift for immediacy with which she reacts to internal and external impulses. Her key expressive tools are gesture and color. From a cluster of events and a plane of indistinguishability, figures, animals, flowers, environments, or places emerge before our eyes, representing the symbolic layer of the artist's personal mythology. At first glance, the world here seems almost crazily cheerful, but a second glance detects a sophisticated, ubiquitous mimicry associated with social masking and communication strategies. Banality is melted down into contradictory, provocative etudes that primarily reflect the fullness of human existence amidst an infinite wealth and diversity of phenomena. Life is a celebration of passing time, in which constructions of human ideas, dreams, and desires accumulate, but also moments of disappointment and pain that undermine these seemingly solid structures. Color here serves as an ironic smile, which, from a distanced perspective, affirms the state of affairs and shares it with the viewer.

In connection with her work, Jolana Škachová mentions the method of "guided intuition." It is precisely through this path that she reveals the hidden paradoxes of our perception, which shatters between precise details and elusive, vanishing wholes. Through a slow, drawn examination of objectivity, she evokes and explicates conscious and subliminal relationships between what is seen and what is experienced. For these, the artist finds an allegorical, fantastical morphology full of shifts in meaning and expression. With it, she also discovers a meditative interspace in which, as if in a laboratory, she observes the process of objectivity emancipating itself from its predicted utility (in terms of function) and banality (in terms of perception). The process of slowly examining relational principles and layering translucent crayon surfaces over time analogously recalls the literary techniques of Milan Kundera, which communicate the distress, complications, and anxieties of seemingly banal and straightforward situations. Beneath the surface of the "pseudo-concrete" (Karel Kosík), the world appears seductively magical, alluringly enchanting, and—paradoxically—all too terrifying in its apparent simplicity.

Petr Vaňous, Exhibition Curator

Photo © Lenka Lormanová