30th Vladimír Boudník Award
Czech Gallery of Modern Art in Prague
2025
curator © Petr Vaňous (the member of the jury)
Dream within a dream
Essence is the ultimate quality in the heart of the subject (Gilles Deleuze)
Lenka Falušiová's drawings and graphic art show sensitive, introverted traits. Her precise artistic expression, based on intuitive composition of the whole down to the smallest details, is introspection projected into partly found, partly imaginary natural settings. These then exhibit the characteristics of a unique, self-absorbed organism (Bush I, 2013; Forest, 2018). A graduate of the graphic studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, she studied under Professor Jiří Lindovský and Professor Dalibor Smutný, where she acquired excellent academic skills. Both mentors have previously received the Vladimír Boudník Award for their graphic work. The author's themes grow out of two basic renewable sources. The first is regular, direct contact with the great outdoors, and the second is the boundless and impenetrable realm of dreams. Both sources meet and intertwine cyclically in the ideal space of pictorial illusion (Cesta, 2023). Falušiová's primary means of expression is drawing. From this, the constitution and atmosphere of the pictorial composition grows and reveals itself. Although the drawing is detailed, precise, and descriptive, it conceals a difficult-to-distinguish interface between inspiration from the objective state of the landscape (description) and inner imagination directed toward the essence (Dream in a Dream, 2023), which speaks much more about the mood and atmosphere of an ideal place in the generalization of its undisturbed, integral nature and, from the point of view of objective conditions, its actual inaccessibility and unattainability (Touch of Silence, 2016).
Lenka Falušiová's graphics and drawings are also visual windows into the world of constant natural changes, which the author "freezes," observes, and examines (Inner World, 2015). She is fascinated by the metamorphoses of the living ecosystem, the growth of vegetation, which transforms from initial chaos into a certain order, filling the space and creating a living framework for wild fauna (Fox, 2024). Only after the movement has stopped does the "shape of metamorphosis" reveal itself as a kind of imprint of time (Light in the Forest, 2021; Relikvie lesa [Relics of the Forest], 2021). It is as if we were looking into a paradise hatchery from which life itself arises (and disappears) in hidden principles, and the author discreetly reveals these principles to us (Srdce lesa [Heart of the Forest], 2014; Lesní květ [Forest Flower], 2018).
We find ourselves in the midst of magical transformations, evoked in a non-literary and non-allegorical way, not only through perfect drawing but above all through the expressive means of dramatization, such as contrasts of light and dark (Touch of Light, 2021), or an emphasis on brightness, luminosity (choice of color) or, conversely, the darkness of graphic printing from the same matrix (The Secret of Darkness, 2014). Within a single graphic, we immerse ourselves in a case-by-case (theoretically infinite) spectrum of differently oriented essences. Behind them, we sense the abandonment of concrete, measurable time, which is transformed here into a dimension of timeless ecstasy, into something that frees the eye and, with it, human consciousness from the heaviness and anxiety that bind human existence. This is replaced by the transparency of essence (Hidden in the Rocks, 2019).
Another group of Lenka Falušiová's graphic works reflects the surfaces and structures of geological formations such as mountain or rock massifs (Prostor, 2020). Here, too, we witness a transformative effort that liberates human consciousness from the material essence of the world through sight and reflects instead the light and atmospheric conditions from which the very processes of shaping the earth emerge like mist or a dream, transformations that take place in another dimension of time (Rocks I-V, 2019). The defining feature here is the thematization of frozen movements and breaks within geological masses, which are reflected in their upper layers and, with their visual drama, contribute to blurring the boundaries between organic and inorganic nature (In the Silence of Rocks, 2019). The rocks suddenly come to life and undulate like tree crowns shaped by the wind (Mysterious Worlds of a Single Stone, 2022; Sound of the Mountain, 2022). Nature here becomes a universal place of solitude, contemplation, and meditation. The human subject merges with the surroundings, loses itself in them, is absorbed by them. The only thing that remains as a human presence here is the memory of the observer, whose contours, however, fade into involuntariness and an essence close to a dream.
One might quote Gilles Deleuze, who wrote that “the subject does not explain essence; rather, essence implies, causes, and twists itself within itself, constituting subjectivity (...) Essence is not only individual, it is individualizing (...) The coiled world of essence is always the beginning of the world itself, the beginning of the universe, the absolute radical beginning (...) Essence defined in this way is the birth of time itself. Not time already unfolded: the dimensions according to which it could unfold have not yet been distinguished, nor have the series into which it is divided in different rhythms been separated." And elsewhere, Deleuze adds: "If we look for (...) something in life that corresponds to the situation of original essences, we do not find it in any personality, but rather in a certain deep state. This state is sleep." And we are back to the dream, which is so important to the author's work.
Finally, let us recall that the talented artist Lenka Falušiová was repeatedly nominated for the Vladimír Boudník Award in 2022, 2023, and 2024 for her graphic work, which overlaps with drawing and painting. In 2025, she deservedly became its laureate, joining a number of young artists who are conquering and beneficially cultivating the contemporary Czech art scene.
