The exhibition represents the artworks of Lucia Tallova assembled into a whole of a space installation. The boundaries between the artefacts do not matter, because one artwork finishes the other and together, they create a poetically congenial statement.

In her installations and three-dimensional collages, Lucia Tallova works with old photographs and second-hand furniture. The photograph is complemented by sensitive interventions, such as adding a paint spot, another image or object, in various manipulated forms (crumpled, scrolled, torn, etc.). At other times, she proceeds in the opposite direction and selects a detail from the image that she isolates. With these authorial gestures, Tallova violates and overwrites the subject of the photographic record, which results in an awakening of the photographic medium and a revival of the image (of the time past) in the present space. 

The current exhibition follows the previous exhibition projects in which the author emphasized the exterior of the works. She first thematized her works through the construction of the archive (construction of the artwork as an archive of memories), then she arrived at more relaxed forms, where she did not necessarily limit her works with a frame and moved to open compositions of some kind of internal(ized) visual landscapes. These landscapes are neither real nor unreal, nor are they more mental than physical, i.e. truly present "here". 

Tallova's work is characterized by two pictorial motifs: sea landscape and airy atmosphere. The author keeps returning to sea levels and water shores, or steam, air, and clouds. She returns to them not only on the subject level of photographic records but also in her paintings. Paintings, large-sized canvases, and small watercolours on paper seem to capture movement as a form of a cycle of constancy - water that changes into water vapour; crystallizes and then returns to its original state. This transformation, which is the cypher of motion (but the motion from the perspective of time!), happens also when the images of water vapour vanish before our eyes and disappear into an abstract painting, which is perhaps an even truer portrait of its subject. 

Lucia Tallova constructs her objects as islands or mountains. In both cases, it is a symbolic place that is inaccessible and distant. That is why Tallova's landscapes are mostly empty. In these absent distant landscapes, there is only a void and time and duration. The movement we mentioned earlier is not a movement of action, but on the contrary, a movement subjected to time, an exchange between real and imaginary, figurative and abstract, subjective and objective, physical and mental, actual and virtual (near and distant, present and absent, past). More clearly, Lucia Tallova's works present the physical objects known from our everyday reality, introduced into unusual encounters and connections, when they become rather a picture-memory or a picture-dream. After all, when we remember or dream, we are not in the past but rather in both times at once, since both times double and mingle, creating a new reality - an image-island.

If we were searching for the name for this time, it could be ‘every day’. The author conceives natural images as forms unifying everyday life into the form of eternity and unchanging order. At the same time, everydayness has two contradictory forms in Tallova's works - sometimes it is an unbearable burden, other times it is an expression of contemplative beauty. 

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Lucia Miklošková

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Lucia Tallová (1985) connects the classic medium of painting with spatial installations, objects, collages, photographs, creating both a thoughtful and a material connection between the elaborated themes and techniques. Increasingly, it moves into space, and when the painting remains ubiquitous and still dominant, the places abstain in an intuitive gesture. Artist developed the theme of the archive in the form of a spatial specific installation of wooden shelves and racks occupied by collages, objects, paintings, old photographs and albums under which Tallová told the fictional stories of anonymous people. Artist work often possesses the character of collages, of archives in which new systems are determined by storing and rearranging various materials. She manipulates and interprets the residue, the remains of her work, often, in her view, the material that is visually useless, yet not thrown away: she gives it the right to a new existence and  create fictional archive. The subject of a personal archive also refers to the artist's collection and collection of old photographs, albums, postcards, porcelain, stones and various bizarre objects and furniture, a troublesome objects that they subsequently manipulate and transform. They are made of a working material and a tool, underlined by layering and repeating its distinctive motifs and symbols, such as the black ink, the tear of colour, the dust and smoke particles, blurred horizons, ribbons or flowers as strong symbols of femininity, nostalgia and sentiment. The female figure becomes the central theme of the redesigned story of black and white photographs. The artist deliberately exploits mistakes in photographs - blurry, erroneous, blurred images, bad compositions, flaws and mistakes in making them, and the impact of time and patina on photographic papers. These errors accentuate, overlap, and transform through painting and collage. Archiving and diary comes from a long term repetitive need and it should capture dailiness. Even the most absolute form of archive is nothing more than author´s personal estimation and his or her choice of moments. The moments worth archiving, memories and the rest chosen to be forgotten. 

 

In the latest installations and objects, Tallová uses her old ink drawings and watercolour paintings, which suddenly become a material - they are further manipulating, cutting and gluing, rebuilding the collage, which the never-presented work from sketches and the grasp of her studio receive "second life." Some of the objects refer to automatic artwork, such as circle spinning and new reworking of old works and stories in translated meaning. The main element of installations is the cyclical repetition, intuitive collection and storage, not the work itself with space, its architecture and the visitor's movement in it. The objects and furniture occupy the exhibition space in a thoughtful stage design that underlines and communicates with the character of the gallery and is finishing together a homogeneous atmospheric environment where the past is brought to the present. 

 

 

In landscape painting Lucia Tallová developed unique recognizable langue. Artist is exploring the power of ornamental structures and decorative fragments, that are made using authentic artistic technique. This technique is based on application of embroideries and crochetings directly onto faces of canvases. Working with decorative laces means, that final works deal with specific visual qualities, but also with the expressing of an inner inexplicit content. Overlaying or superposition of these components determines the sentimentality, sincere nostalgia and naive decorativism of the canvases. The work of Lucia Tallová represents intimate storytelling, that is narrated through the medium of painting. The artist combines two contradictory visual experiences: impersonal product of the industrial society and ethereal dreamy landscape. Depicted objects are emerging from (or blurring into) empty spaces of the canvas and abstract plains of the painting act as a site of a contradictory conflict between minimal invasion and excessive decorating.

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