LUCIA TALLOVA - CLOUDS
Lucia Tallová entered the visual art scene while still a university student, already with a clearly recognizable artistic signature. It was a moment exceptionally favorable to the medium of painting, a time when all debates about painting and its (un)necessity in the age of digital imagery had finally subsided. For the artist, a reduced color palette—most notably black monochrome—became characteristic. This was not a form of rebellion against the instructor’s guidance, nor a provocation, but rather an assent to an overriding inner directive. Tallová’s paintings are introverted. Their subject is landscape—outwardly bleak, quiet, and empty. The absence of the human figure amplifies the sense that these works offer a window into another land, one in which time and duration reside.
The artist’s early paintings depicted deserted urban settings, industrial or housing-estate infrastructures into which she incorporated ornaments: lace, a necklace, porcelain roses, or a crystal chandelier that introduced an emotional filter of sorts. Lace motifs reminiscent of curtains formed a foreground and a barrier, further multiplying the distance between the viewer and the landscape. Even in these paintings, the artist was already working with her characteristic “dissolving” of the image. It seems as if the picture fades before our eyes, acknowledging its fictional nature—its status as a painting, a mixture of water and pigment. The running paint disrupts the depiction and transforms a concrete landscape scene into an abstract environment. By revealing the fictional—or rather processual—quality of painting, Tallová simultaneously inserts into the work an element of unfolding (movement): a tension within the moment, carrying the potential of activity in both directions—toward disappearance, but also toward emergence. It is a state of continual becoming.
A deliberate element of “defect” appears in another form in the artist’s later works as well—paintings marked by strange, indeterminate shapes that resemble dust particles or fragments of burnt paper drifting through the air. Through them, Tallová enhances spatial depth, disrupts the composition, and constructs a distinctive visual quality. Whether dripping paint or airborne particles, both “defective” features are powerful visual elements that lend the work an unreal character, an imaginative quality akin to a dream or vision.
Her fascination with the threshold between abstraction and concreteness—between the emergence of the image and its dissolution—finds its most striking expression thus far in her series of clouds. These large-format paintings of aerial atmospheres approach an extremely minimalist motif as a dramatic theatre of the elements of water and air, but also, in a certain transferred sense, of the element of painting itself, for they reveal its power to (trans)form pigment and water into depiction. The paintings—large canvases as well as small watercolors on paper—seem to capture movement: water turning into vapor, crystallizing, and then returning to its original state. This transformation, the cipher of movement, occurs at the very moment when the images of water vapor fade before our eyes and dissolve into abstract painting, which may in fact be an even truer portrait of its subject.
The black-and-white palette strengthens the imaginative dimension of the works; it implicitly contains the full range of color while directing attention toward pure form—the morphology of depiction. It is precisely black that becomes the structural tool through which the artist defines her painterly position within object-based forms and installations.
Excerpt from a text by Lucia Miklošková for the book MAĽBA SK, 2022, published by Slovart.
UMRIAN GALLERY
Bratislava, Slovakia
30. July - 4. Sepetember 2020
