Kamila Maliňáková: How to Break Through as a Contemporary Painter
5. 8. – 27. 8. 2015
opening: 4. 8. 2015
curator: Vasil Artamonov
Kamila Maliňáková uses family relationships and those between friends, the environment of her school where she studies art, or her own (and other people´s) ideas of the world of “high art” as her themes. She views these themes from her natural, uncomplicated perspective and always works with them in a similar way. She adjusts the theme in a funny, impulsive manner and then slowly, laboriously transfers it into the media of painting. For some reason she seems to enjoy making this moment – the practical transfer onto the canvas – rather complicated. At this stage she gathers sketches, photographs, 3D models and collages. All these artifacts, the witnesses of Kamila´s specific persistent strategy, are eventually removed despite their effectiveness and her work always results in a hanging painting.
Figurative, usually even figural painting. Although the figures are stiff (they look like a virtual reality product), and although the artist usually uses a hieratic perspective, the impression they give is veristic. The anxiously disciplined painting doesn´t carry traces of typical delights, traditionally expected from the given medium. It raises questions about the technological replaceability and about the meaning of gesture in painting.
The paintings are very hermetic in meaning and hard to understand for the uninitiated viewer. The constellations of figures and objects in the paintings are constructed so that they reveal a story familiar only to the artist herself or to a circle of her friends. By using her specific gesture and an elaborate technique the artist creates intimate compositions inspired by her own experience. And thanks to their hermetic nature and inaccessibility for a “foreign” gallery goer the oil paintings (which accept no other discourse but the artist´s) become performative products reaching beyond the border of a typical perception of a painting.
From a long-term perspective, Kamila´s works are, and at the same time are not, systematic. Kamila doesn´t consider her themes in a series, she doesn´t elaborate on one or several themes on purpose. Her work develops naturally, like the artist herself. Family, friends, relationships – all these remain, only the spectrum of figures included in Kamila´s personal mythology widens. Although some aspects of her creation (partly bearing an art therapy character) could be labeled as naïve, the smooth and even surface of her paintings with the optimistic coloring conceals almost existential metaphor of impossibility of escape from family, social and institutional bonds.
Marie Lukáčová and Vasil Artamonov
Jeleni Gallery exhibition program is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and Prague City Council
Media support: Artycok.tv, ArtMap and jlbjlt.net
