Denisa Štefanigová & Miroslava Večeřová / I’ll Hold You With My Gaze

The exhibition of the work of the intermedial artist Miroslava Večeřová and the painter Denisa Štefanigová examines the possibilities of sharing and interconnection with other beings. For the artists, directness, sincerity and intimacy of eye contact become a metaphor for alternative ways of communication and recognition, which by contrast with rationalist Western discourse are not shackled to a tendency to pigeonhole the universe into norms and formulae in an attempt to govern and control everything. Via the eye as a symbol of empathy and understanding, in which physicality is combined with emotion and spirituality, the artists seek more sensitive ways of interaction and bonding with other beings, either human or non-human. While Denisa Štefanigová perceives the fluidity of being-with-otherness as a process that guides her towards an understanding and acceptance of herself, Miroslava Večeřová in her work revives the archetypal desire for communion with the elemental forces of nature and other beings.

In Denisa Štefanigová’s paintings ghostlike figures emerge from the broad, fluid brushstrokes, their stylisation sometimes reaching into the realm of a mysterious symbol or emblem. Physical forms, both human and non-human, appear to flow spontaneously into one another, forming an analogy to complexly interwoven emotional states that flood the surface of the canvas like uncontrollable waves, and disrupt the fixed boundaries of the shapes. Štefanigová’s paintings create a raw impression, and are linked primarily with the search for personal identity that takes place within a process of an endless flow of becoming in relationships with other beings. For this reason, the artist allows herself to be guided by her own intuition and the fluidity of the painting process itself, which she further accentuates by washing the acrylic paints into a thin, watery solution that shrouds the images in a peculiar atmosphere reminiscent of an underwater world. Sometimes she proceeds to the more radical gesture of trimming the surface of the canvas as a further step in the search for the resulting shape, reflecting the untrammelled forces of nature, the sources of which the artist in her endeavour to be true to herself seeks both within herself and within the creative process. The personifications of these forces in her paintings are anthropomorphised beings that fix a penetrating, spellbinding gaze directly at the viewer’s eyes. The viewer is thus drawn inside the painting process, while at the same time becoming the object of observation. The balance of the dialogue between viewer and painting, or viewer and artist, is thus established.

By contrast with Denisa Štefanigová’s introspective paintings, Miroslava Večeřová turns her attention to the natural environment and our primeval ancestors, who emerged from the depths of the oceans in prehistoric times. Večeřová has been living and working for many years on the coast of the British Isles, constantly surrounded by the sea, which also distinctively frames her artistic production. In tidal zones, where marine and terrestrial ecosystems meet in an often tempestuous clash, one is directly confronted with the primary elements of wind, water and stone, as well as with a cyclical rhythm of time that transcends the life of the individual. Face to face with nature, we are invited to engage in cosmological reflections on the origin of life on Earth and ancient animistic and mythological conceptions of the driving forces of the Earth, which blur the boundaries between animate and inanimate matter, and between the physical and spiritual realm. It is precisely through physicality and materiality that Večeřová seeks a path to a long-lost connection to the primeval forces of nature, and similarly to David Abram in his book Becoming Animal the artist celebrates the “enlivening pleasure of earthly contact.”

Although Miroslava Večeřová studied photography, in recent years she has focused primarily on creating video performances, objects and drawings which provide her with greater opportunities to work with her own physicality. She uses fragments of the White Cliffs of Dover that have slowly fallen off due to the impact of erosion as material for her objects. The artist collects the fragile material and further shapes it with her own fingers, caresses it and carves her fingernails into it in a kind of loving archaic ritual. Večeřová symbolically returns the element of water into this sedimentary rock, which was formed millions of years ago through the accumulation of the shells of dead micro-organisms, by inserting into it enlarged digital photographs of the eyes of actual sea creatures. Through the means of water and limestone, which are also the fundamental building blocks of the human body, the artist provides us with the opportunity to approach these strange creatures, which could be relics of a mythical past or equally magical amulets from a distant future.

The elements of water and limestone are defining also for her other work, whether this concerns her pastel drawings within frames resembling kelp or her video performances, which can be viewed as a poetic metaphor of an interspecies kinship, as written about by Donna Haraway.

The personal levels of the approach of both Denisa Štefanigová and Miroslava Večeřová are linked not only by their emphasis on the authenticity of their creation, conceived as an expression of desire and enchantment with all forms of life, but also in their anchoring in ecofeminist discourse, which focuses on a search for interspecies solidarity and sustainable relationships, and on a more general level also in the concept of a new materialism with emphasis on the specific experience of the body.