INSCAPE
U Prstenu Gallery in Prague
2019
curator © Barbora Kundračíková
She flicks her words like lit matches. They drop delicately, burning.
- Kate Tempest, The Bricks that Built the Houses
In his book dedicated to Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze talks about the third eye, the haptic, tactile eye that sees in this way. Visuality, as we have understood it for the past few decades, is something quite different. We are a visual society—but definitely not a figurative one, as demonstrated, among other things, by the overuse of sight as an expression of a concrete, distanced, i.e., manipulative attitude toward the world, which, of course, cannot be touched, does not smell, does not make a sound, and has no taste. All the hedonism of metaphor, of movement in the intuited, the unclear, in color, in space, has been replaced by the transparency of the senses, the correctness of the concept, the conviction that the complexity of living can be summed up in a positive finding. Such waste! Such deprivation!
Every system is a matter of setting internal boundaries. Landscape and inscape. The first is external, the second internal—the first can be seen, the second felt. Intuitively, there is a similar contradiction between the optical and the haptic as there is between the imaginative and the fantastical. The first is shared and detached, the second personal and beyond control. The former is intended for communication, the latter for experience. What happens when inscape becomes landscape? If the optical/haptic pair is associated with Alois Riegl, who used it to describe (material) relief art, and Deleuze, who applied it to Bacon's sensual painting, the imagination/fantasy duo fantasy first appears in Thomas Coleridge's reflections on the limits of cognition and later in Roger Scruton, who used it to attack ostentatious (pornographic) photography. With this in mind, I reflect on Lenka Falušiová's works, on their graphic basis, on her freehand drawings and graphic prints, on the breadth of the spectrum that they not only show but, above all, make us feel. Her work is based on an infinite number of details, fragments, and units that together create a solid structure, a system, a cluster—chaos—a tangle. It demonstrates diversity, evoking both concentration and overload. And it calls for silence, because it uses the delicacy of suggestion, layering, slow revelation (of itself). It is not a structure of signs, it is not a linear system. I am not looking for either of these things here – and I do not find them either. What fascinates me is the fullness of space. The way it can handle it, i.e., the absence of the concrete and its revocation. The eye glides over the surface, sinks, falls, gropes, searches—and finds. It becomes hybrid, a third: the contradiction between the tactile and the optical does not exist.
