IN THE SILENCE
Krystal Gallery in Havířov
2025
review from the website Ostravan.cz, author of the text © Jaroslav Michna
The Krystal Gallery in Havířov can be found on Dělnická Street in Havířov, and until September 26, the talented artist Lenka Falušiová is exhibiting her graphic and drawing works. The author, born in 1988, a graduate of the graphic studio at the Prague Academy, comes from Vrbno pod Pradědem, and as you can see, the backdrops of the natural environment in which she grew up have permeated the thematic and expressive language of her work.
The forest is a sacred place. Not because it is said so, but because it is an environment of fascinating autonomy that can easily do without humans, and even if humanity intervenes in the forest community, mining it, felling it, straightening rivers, artificially planting vegetation, the forest will always eventually become a unique zone where millions of organisms, plants and fungi coexist in a kind of sacred dance.
The forest is the starting point. By abandoning it, humans embarked on a different trajectory that ends in the concrete strata of megalopolises and deserts devastated by fracking. Now we return to the forests to marvel at the breathtaking self-sufficiency that functions without business plans, operational management, chips, updates and firmware. The forest is a demonstration of divine energy, it does not need advice from artificial intelligence on what to do. If humans were to be wiped off the face of the earth, what would remain here and endlessly regenerate would be the forest.
Lenka Falušiová also walks through the forest with this wonder. We perceive a quiet fascination in her work. This word is not used randomly, it expresses the process when natural motifs enter the author's mind as ultimate communication codes and become creative raw material. The author does not describe what she sees, as it might seem at first glance. She does not create her works either from photographs or in the open air. What we are looking at are the imprints of memory imaginatively interpreted in the studio, and it is necessary to emphasize that the nature of this procedure plays a significant role. Remembering and forming the resulting shape is a contemplative and lengthy process. The demanding processuality is a hidden code that is mostly unconscious to the viewer.
The author imprints the depth of concentrated human work and imagination into her drawings and graphics. Fictitious natural structures created from memory communicate with the same intensity as, for example, photographs, but they retain the mystery of creative modeling, not a simple description of what is seen.
The word mystery can be applied comprehensively to the author's entire work. In fact, it is primarily about a mysterious atmosphere. Individual trees, rocky masses and plants are placed in a mysterious uncertainty, torn from a wider context and isolated in their emotionality. Although the surrounding environment and individual natural objects are often conceived in dark shades, their psychological effect is not disruptive. The trees have a statuesque appearance, arousing wonder and respect, especially in larger formats created using the ink on canvas technique. In my opinion, these are the most impressive in terms of their atmosphere and technique, as they directly convey the process of manual work.
Sometimes in the author's portfolio we find more precisely distilled whole shapes of trees, but mostly our attention is drawn to dense structures of branches, lichens or rocky formations. The author concentrates our attention on individual passages of trees, it can be the bases of spruces, whose long branches connect with the ground, middle passages, but also the very tops. She knows how to give each of the mentioned parts due care and these visual analyses will take us to the point of spiritual wonder.
Although we will not encounter monumental formats in the Havířov gallery, which sometimes reach dimensions of three to five meters, the modest spaces are more like chamber works, you can still come into contact with the power of concentrated artistic work tense to the sacredness of nature.
