A Lover’s Discourse
March 5–April 7, 2024
Stanislava Kovalcikova in the company of VALIE EXPORT
The Goddess Inside the Machine: On the Paintings of Stanislava Kovalcikova Travis Jeppesen
There is little restraint shown—little restraint needed, to be honest, or even desired—in Stanislava Kovalcikova’s paintings, which are the cumulative eye-mind work of a fabulist visionary; one who is very well versed in and well aware of all the complicated threads and minutiae comprising the zeitgeist in which she is embedded, yet also burdened with the great gift of extension: that is, the antenna-like sensitivities needed to posit the existence of some great and consequence-rich Beyond. These paintings-cum- manifestations of a metaphysicality, invocations of a world embedded within this world, swell forth from a highly developed conscience that operates on the skittish boundaries of all temporalities: one simply cannot “locate” her language within any fixed vocabulary of either contemporaneity or classicism or modernism; hers is a restless vision that is quick to evade such meaning-heavy classifications. Instead, Kovalcikova bends toward the timeless in positing her own mythology, which is her very own variation on the Real and all the Sub-Reals that comprise it. However, the lack of restraint I identified in my first sentence should not be mistaken for a lack of discipline on the artist’s part. Kovalcikova paints slowly and with great deliberation; oftentimes one painting can take a year or even longer to complete. There is no hurried or fevered pace at work here, nor does that feeling ever come across on the canvases, either in the brushwork or the completed scenarios. Rather, the layering of imagery that has increasingly become a hallmark of her work, as manifested in the recent Silence and Borders , 2023, is the product of a very deliberate threading, proffering at once a complex tapestry that begs to be unwoven and the seduction of a polyvalent narrative, with the stains of time impinging on the actions and emotions of the present. In that painting, a darkened masculine figure squats before a naked man reclining on his elbows. Upon both their bodies, skin is trespassed:
the backside of a stilettoed nude woman seems to strut and poise her way across the torso of the latter figure, evoking some languid sultry scene of desire perhaps unfulfilled; while the obscurity of the dark figure perched above him bequeaths, upon closer inspection, the muscles and organs beneath the skin, evoking the sense of some demonic or spectral presence: perhaps the very embodiment of death. This ghastliness is accentuated by the welling up, vaporlike, of some possessed female child just above the nude man: not unlike Linda Blair’s character from The Exorcist , her face besmirched by a satanic grimace. Above her, in a sort of ether, yet another figure coalesces; and in the far right, the upper half of two muscular legs. Pulling away, we take in any number of layers, etched in a restrained palette of yellows and grays, evoking any number of scenes and memories playing out against this uncharacterizable confrontation—is it sexual? deathly? likely some combination of both—between the two men. Silences and borders, indeed: this sinister vision of rise and collapse, shaded with foreboding but also erotic possibility. Yellow and gold predominate in these latest paintings. At once the colors of life-givingness (sunshine) and wealth, all the sensate warmth of plenitude, Kovalcikova’s deployment of these colors is rich in a different sense, bringing forth a reveling in their ironic undercurrents. Train of Thought , 2024, is a close-up portrait of a young woman’s face and neck. She is wearing an expensive string of pearls, which she has lifted from her neck by her mouth—she appears to be suckling them, her lowered eyes possibly welling with tears as she savors their icy flavorlessness. The choice of shading, of definition, in her subject’s facial features gives one pause for consideration, for the most dramatic shading begins in the lower portion of the woman’s face, from her cheekbones
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