“Body am I, and soul”—so says the child. And why should one not speak like children?
But the awakened one, the knowing one, says: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something about the body.”

Nietzsche, F., Thus Spoke Zarathustra: The Despisers of the Body 

The issues of moving away from life, leaving, abandoning, death, and imprints that can be left behind in the material world accompany philosophers and artists since the first homo sapiens started to use their hands to paint poorly illuminated walls of their caves.
Even those first humans dealt with the impermanence of the life through art and magical belief that when they draw mammoths, reindeer or muskox, they could control their destiny and soul. And when they visualize a person, they will learn to portrait the human figure in five lines, then, in this reproduction, they will live forever.

In this cycle Barbora Chlastáková works with the denomination of this phenomenon. Keeping the memory, the relationship that the deceased had with those who knew him/her. Whether it's the fictional memory of the murdered girl called Blue Woman or the personal story and farewell to Grannie's called Abandonment, the author always tries to capture the volatility of life and relationship through body morphology. At the same time, the process of painting itself is primarily a relationship to it — by referring to itself, to one's own body, Expectation of great love, to the world, to the viewer. Quite unintentionally, in this cycle originated in 2013, there are archetypal “clues“ that express ideas close to our cultural space. Blue colour dominates in Barbora´s canvases — it is the colour of heaven, distance, water, unreal and fantastic, the colour of divinity and truth. And, above all, for the German poet Novalis, the "blue flower" is a symbol of eternal desire. The central theme of Xx canvases is corporality and the presence of the body in space. It is a compilation of various postmodern quotes on a seemingly fragmented fields of view. Canvases rely to art deco, admitably play with Man Ray, Francis Picabia, František Drtikol, and the essence of the 1920s, and the strong formal inspiration by cubists, rayonists and futurists can be seen on all the canvases. The distinctive "fragmentation" of the image field, in which the author alternates floral and geometric motives, differs from many respects from the futurist or cubist structures of the last century. However, the common feature is formal disparate form of individual canvases as a part of the author's dialogue with the world — its "relation to" the world. Otherwise, it lacks the expressionist confusion of the rapidly developing world and the city, in post-informational period the disruptive construction of her canvases presents similar own unpleasant stories of people. In one of the canvases called Storm, is the perspective essentialy changed, the fields interact with each other, and the strong erotic tension is stressed by the colourful shades as by the subject itself. Dealing with deep human instinctiveness opens to Barbora other layers that relate to it: except our mortality Abandonment, there is also memory, love, sexuality and last but not least, the blue, the endless desire of the "blue flower" which does not leave us, not even when we decide to leave it...

curator: Tomas Kubart

More about Barbora Chlastáková: Relationship Event www