IMMERSION
Contemporary Czech gallery Art in Šumperk, Czech Republic
2022
curator © Barbora Kundračíková
Lenka Falušiová‘s work is compact, complex and coherent. Rarely is it possible to say with such assurance that what we see here is an expression of a mature imagination. Lenka’s work has undergone significant development and further development lies ahead. However, there is a solid core one can lean on securely. This, I think, is what we find so attractive about it. There is a certain tension – between the form and the content, between the manner of work and what it demonstrates. After all, this exhibition is entitled Immersion and it is about immersion, however, at the same time, more than anything else, it evokes the opposite process, the process of emersion.
The landscape and the landscape structures have always been a subject depicted in art. To a certain extent they are related to the evolution of man - they are connected with our sense of direction. However, beside the external space, equally often they are an impetus to explore our inner space within. On the one hand, their function is didactic, on the other hand, they are deeply romantic; they search the finest recesses of the soul for the really big, transcendent subject of art. They demonstrate the process, for which Maurice Merleau-Ponty used the term intentional arc and Martin Heidegger the term Dasein. Both of them are heading in the same direction – of naming the basic condition of our existence in the world, i.e. the body and bodily experience. In the sense of Merleau-Ponty‘s thinking, the body is the tool for the immersion „within“, inside the things, the stories, their own existence. According to Heidegger, the acceptance of the body‘s own temporary nature is the condition of being that is authentic and reconciled with itself.
In this context, Lenka‘s strategy of work is interesting for two reasons. Firstly it is a combination of drawing and graphic art, two delicate techniques that resonate with the body and its natural movement probably the best – a hand grasps an object that is seen, transforming and restoring the object to an existence in a different spatiotemporal scale. This process follows precisely the process or cognition or recognition. Secondly, it is the manner of capturing, creating the structures that are only seemingly intuitive. Without a good measure of knowledge and experience, we could never achieve a comparable result. It is obvious that Lenka‘s eye as well as her hand know exactly what they are doing. And this is what leads me to a conclusion.
Bruno Bettelheim, an Austrian-born psychologist, used the motif of a forest to describe the processes in the human mind. In a study dedicated to fairy-tales he wrote: „Since ancient times the near impenetrable forest in which we get lost has symbolized the dark, hidden, near impenetrable world of our unconscious. If we lost the framework which gave structure to our past life and must now find our way to become ourselves, and have entered this wilderness with an as yet underdeveloped personality, when we succeed in finding our way out we shall emerge with a much more highly developed humanity.“ For a long time this way out was being offered by aesthetics - through our senses we penetrate to the nature of things, which is then grasped by thought, image, which others can relate to. In this sense, a work of art, the supreme expression of human creativity, maybe even of human being itself, may be called truthful in its nature. A little cut-out thereof that Lenka Falušiová contains, a cut-out defined by the span of her personality, suddenly becomes much more significant. It is not necessarily true in the logical, explicatory sense, but it is true in the global sense – as an expression of aspiration for the truth rather than the truth itself. By letting us watch her aspirations in a generous way, Lenka gives us an opportunity to see much more than it originally appeared. She gives us an opportunity to emerge from the forest unscathed.
