Gabriela Medvedova

The hero from the novel The Foam of Days by Boris Vian is asked: "How do you spend your brightest time?"
The reply: "I spend it making it dark because light irritates me."

The painter Gabriela Medved'ova spends her time making the world bright and transparent. I have been planning "to send" the text to the painter for three years. Now I am examining it to see whether it has not become redundant. The painter paints more brightly while my writting has become "darker". I have in mind the darkness of the hero from the novel by Vian, Since the painter has been very much concerned with the written text, I have kept on asking her whether she still paints in the same way as is written in this "dark" text. In fact most texts we read about artists could be simply transferred and nothing would happen. On other occasions, I have the impression that the texts written on artists can be better than the actual works of art. This artist has been preoccupied with this text for three years, perhaps she really wanted to paint in the way suggested in this novel: "Good works provoke me to search for corresponding words in my memory Words or quotations."

On this occasion I would like to quote my favourite critic, Jili Chalupecky: "A perfect world, a world without suffering, would be an indolent world, which would not be worth being aware of. Only a permanently losing and discovering world, a permanently dying and birthing world is the world which can be felt and known a world which is worth living in. If we speak about beauty we speak about the perception of this world. Therefore beauty is not pleasantness, and art, which turns beautiful, belongs to a society; which is internally deteriorating. Beauty is tragic or comic, it lies in the great feeling of the world, in the great perception to which man can react with a cry of pain or laughter. In the tension between the sacredness of beauty and the profanity of mortality, art allows humanity to be perceived in its essence."

When these words were written the painter was only one year old. What has changed since then? Perhaps the fact that today we do not have to speak about the tragic or the comic as mutually exclusive principles, or excluding anything else that is usually unconnected. They used to say "either/or", now we say "not only but also". The painter does not disengage in the Modernist sense, but rather in the Post-Modernist way (nowadays I would prefer not to use this word because it has degenerated and besides we have gone further than before).
What is the painter's awareness of life and her fundamental semantic gesture? It lies somewhere between beauty and pain splendour and suffering. But it is also somewhere between vigorous expressiveness and mediative lyricism. The painter remains true to the development of her motifs of her pictures: squares, circles, sieves, chessboards, targets - the motifs "of flying away" and yet the "landing" message. Those who are seeing her paintings for the first time should know that the artist has behind her a rich collection of realistic works which she would not place in too sharp a contrast to the type of abstract painting she is presenting today. Her's is a higher type of realism. It is the realism of the truthfulness of "surfaces" (today I would add, that it is realism of a kind that endows emptiness with transparency). She is aware that today depth has come to the surface. She is creating a kind of sports stadium that can be a metaphor for a game in the broadest sense of the word. Do we play a game or are we played by it? Her intrusion into the regular geometrical basis could be interpreted, with a little poetic licence, as the need for the change of one game, during its duration into quite another. The games of life are varied. We begin our life with volleyball and have to finish with basketball. Any sort of pathos or simplification is alien to the painter, however - everything takes place on a purely artistic level.

I wrote the preceding text in March 1997 on the occasion of the exhibition of Gabriela Medvedova held at the Polnobanka Gallery. What has changed in the painter's work since then? For her, it has been a fruitful time of self-exploration, carried out by allowing her pictorial language to speak out. More than ever before, the painter is obsessed not only by art but is also preoccupied with the transparency of life. Such are her latest pictures - objects. She is striving to diminish the borderline between life and creation. The more her simple, predominantly geometric motifs are endowed with light and space to somehow "flyaway", the more the artist, and the creator of life, draws us into their imaginatory centre. It is quite apparent from the objects presented at her last exhibition at the Passagegalerie - Kunstlerhaus in Vienna that she has moved away from the surface to the stereoscopic "mandala" - interspace. She dreams and achieves the dream of many artists - to enter their pictures. In a way she reminds us of "the reversed perspective" of the Russian icon painters - one of her great art loves. Contrary to the perspective of Renaissance, or that of New Age, icons were also concerned with the movement "from back to front". This dimension was also evident in her surface objects and, even more so in her spatial installations. The "installation of life" is of greater importance than any "installation of art" for Gabriela Medvedova.

Created mainly from paper, her objects respond to a gentle breeze. On a cultural level, they reflect the stoic-Christian tradition. The gentle rhythm radiating from the painter's objects truly suggest a sort of "angelic murmur" an invisible, yet spiritually clear interspace. This is a gesture close to that of the Russian poet Marina Cvetajevova, who also writes about angelic dehumanised spheres (in the sense of the philosophy of Ortega y Gasset). "I dislike people, I like angels" - wrote the poet. Finally, both the poet and the painter have been preoccupied with a more purified humanism. This painter is not only concerned with purifying "herself", but also with purifying her surroundings from "herself". If poetry is a potential virtual reality, then the artist is obliged to realise his/her poetic gift. However, we cannot give presents to ourselves, therefore it is the relationship between I and YOU in which HE/SHE: and YOU lies in infinity - in human faces.