Pneuma

PNEUMA

Miroslava Večeřová

Pavel Příkaský

 

Oblastní Galerie Liberec – Lázně, Czech Republic (www.ogl.cz)

Curator: Viktor Čech

Opening: Sept. 27th, 2018 at 5:30 p.m.

Exhibition dates: Sept. 27th, 2018 – Jan. 1st, 2019

 

This project by two artists with years of cooperation behind them was born at the intersection between the classical painter’s strokes in figurative art and current trends that are connecting technical images with the human body’s performative expression. The human body and its anchoring in the material and the organic are fundamental topics here overall, reflecting the current bodily perception of humans themselves: biological organisms that today are absorbing digital information alongside their traditional diet of chemical and genetic information.

Today’s body culture—which attempts to balance out bodies’ lifestyle diseases with a cult of health in areas from sports to therapy to general care—has built up a complex visual language around itself. Various efforts to interest potential customers in often-commoditized care are undertaken through a precise aesthetic that promises its fulfillment by projecting the viewer into tempting archetypes of strength, health, relaxation, freshness, and energy. However, the seemingly flawless elegance, purity, and “scientificness” of all of these health-industry sectors that this visuality presents to us often mask our true carnality. Behind the marbled perfection of the abstracted bodily form is hidden the body’s inner world, full of organs, tissue, fluids, and metabolic processes. The world of that which is in reality also tightly connected with our surface and with what is in fact our largest organ: our skin. We are each a living process, exchanging substances, constantly excreting and accepting. Motion lasting until our deaths passes throughout all of our matter and connects our thought, breath, and digestion in one.

Observe this exhibition around yourself; breathe freely and deeply. Perceive how the breath slides through the inside of your body inside and out again, and believe, for a while, the visions of the old Stoics, who claimed that breath is Pneuma, organizing the individual and the cosmos.

In their joint projects, Miroslava Večeřová (*1985) and Pavel Příkaský (*1985), respectively a photographer and a painter by education, meet at the intersection of the human body, materials, and representation in images. The means of expression that they toy with are marked by a fragile artistic sensibility reflecting the flavors of sensory impulses with which modern visuality and our personal associations provoke us. They shape a dialogue between the body, its biology, and body care—connected with the body’s classical ideal—and between the ungraspable fluidity with which everything is transmuted by Mother Nature, into a wondrous story with a subversive subtext.