Veronika Holcová
Hominids
Veronika Holcova enters the memory of humankind and landscape like a prophetic dream, the earth–shattering kind that no one remembers in the morning. Her hominid has a great future before him, yet the expression on his face betrays fear. Though striding forward, he seems to be backing away from his fate. He does not yet know that using his stick/dick he will extract meaning, truth and beauty from the silicon desert full of startled silence. He strides towards a location which we may only look back on: our collective memory. Yet he can already envisage the place towards which we are still heading. Maybe this is the reason for his somewhat irresolute attitude, his uncertain expression.
But the situation is even more complicated. Forces from the unconscious express themselves on her canvases with an unprecedented intensity and sophistication. The ape is also the artist's delirious vision of herself with an eternal desire, an eternal erection, in eternal solitude. It is an almost archetypal parable about what being human (also) means, a parable emerging symptomatically at a time that is merrily hurtling towards the mechanical reproduction of everything, towards an era of fatal inhumanity. Nonetheless, memory does not capture time, but rather narrative. In the end all is memory and anticipation, in other words – a hypothesis, a lie or an ideal. The landscape beneath the ape's feet, as yet calm, almost inert, will be marked by culture and civilisation, by stories great and small. The hominid too strides towards his story, his alter ego, humanising himself by searching for his own, super–individual, identity. In her older paintings with no figural leitmotif, dramatic landscapes are captured in the frame of the canvas as if in trapped in hermeneutic snares, waiting for final penetration of their impenetrable nature much as a woman waits to be raped. The landscapes are at times so dark that one can only guess at what may lie within and its magnitude. Acts that are concealed, or merely hinted at, transpire there, the artist herself only suspects their nature and complexity. Veronika Holcova’s work is an example of metaphysical and at the same time highly intelligent painting that draws on unconscious and imaginary motifs, elaborating them into thought–out wholes that are balanced in terms of composition and colour, and have a strong emotive effect.
Ladislav Šerý
But the situation is even more complicated. Forces from the unconscious express themselves on her canvases with an unprecedented intensity and sophistication. The ape is also the artist's delirious vision of herself with an eternal desire, an eternal erection, in eternal solitude. It is an almost archetypal parable about what being human (also) means, a parable emerging symptomatically at a time that is merrily hurtling towards the mechanical reproduction of everything, towards an era of fatal inhumanity. Nonetheless, memory does not capture time, but rather narrative. In the end all is memory and anticipation, in other words – a hypothesis, a lie or an ideal. The landscape beneath the ape's feet, as yet calm, almost inert, will be marked by culture and civilisation, by stories great and small. The hominid too strides towards his story, his alter ego, humanising himself by searching for his own, super–individual, identity. In her older paintings with no figural leitmotif, dramatic landscapes are captured in the frame of the canvas as if in trapped in hermeneutic snares, waiting for final penetration of their impenetrable nature much as a woman waits to be raped. The landscapes are at times so dark that one can only guess at what may lie within and its magnitude. Acts that are concealed, or merely hinted at, transpire there, the artist herself only suspects their nature and complexity. Veronika Holcova’s work is an example of metaphysical and at the same time highly intelligent painting that draws on unconscious and imaginary motifs, elaborating them into thought–out wholes that are balanced in terms of composition and colour, and have a strong emotive effect.
Ladislav Šerý
