CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Jana Farmanová | Weightlessness
Jana Farmanová
Weightlessness
April 18, 2012 – May 26, 2012
Vernon Gallery
About the Heart as about the Stone, Pulsating and Trembling
In her art Jana Farmanová devotes herself solely to painting. Since 1998 she has gradually acquired a unique public. She focused on art even in the difficulty period up to 2005, when this medium was not at the centre of interest of the professional community, and continuously since 2005, during which time her professional and lay following has grown, but her work does not relate to and is not thematically or formally connected with the rise of so-called new painting.
The artist draws on her own experiences obtained in the tradition of international historical painting and 20th-century painting1 and works with intellectual and visual themes that theorists then identify as cycles. Jana Farmanová bases herself on the painting tradition not just visually and aesthetically, but also in terms of the language of art history, through which she found a legitimate tool with which to express her own intellectual interests. As a painter she is able to work with the colour of Pompeii frescoes, the light of late 19th-century Les Nabis group, and the density and dynamism of 20th-century painting.
There are themes that the artist revisits repeatedly because they rank among those she deals with most and the artist makes no secret of the fact that their images and situations are drawn from her own private sphere – adolescence, changing life decades, the transition from childhood into a woman or man. What appeals to her and is a constant motivation in her work is the ambivalence that unites individual themes and phenomena: innocence – responsibility, uninterrupted play - obligation and so on. The personal preoccupation with relationships and the associated ambivalences of breakup, separation, union, and rediscovery are also inexhaustible sources of metaphorical images that are part of her recent cycle of watercolours About the Heart (2011) and they are also one of the basic themes in the current exhibition.
In this cycle the heart is a metaphor for a crossroads in life, and a real pulsating organ into which a woman’s hand can reach as easily as into a small clutch purse. In her small watercolour paintings the artist analyses various forms of relationship and sorts them into visual metaphors. Expression in watercolour forces her to work quickly and with concentration and an accumulation of creative energy.
The third thematic area that she explores in her exhibitions relates to her research. This involves a series of watercolours and oil paintings in which she portrays people sleeping. Physically the body and soul are present, but in an altered state of consciousness in which the brain’s natural response to stimuli does not work. Through this visual research the artist tries again to capture the ambivalence of the presence and absence of physical being, as well as the boundaries between the depiction of a portrait and how it changes in states of consciousness and sleep.
The metaphor of the heart as the theme in a large cycle of works, studies of people sleeping, children in adolescence are nothing new in the history of art. They are often the themes of films and literary writings. What is important in the case of Jana Farmanová is the constant analysis, the continuous investigation of her own life and artistic outlook, never being satisfied with just one statement. Layers of opinions, creative freedom, and space for her own experience as an outlook. Here the artistic research is like a trembling, a small shift to the side, like when we try to push two magnets with the same polarity together and we can’t. Always a new image, always a little deviation, and a layer of creativity.
Text was prepared with Mgr. Ivana Moncoľová
(Art theorist and doctoral student at VŠVU in Bratislava)
KIT RESICH / CLEANSING LIGHT
