works / Flight of the Eagle, Singing of Mushrooms

Galerie HYB4, Prague 1 / 21 June – 22 July 2023

Flight of the Eagle, Singing of Mushrooms: dance of reality by Kamila Ženatá

Every secret tends to show itself, just as everything hidden tends to manifest itself.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

The creative play of consciousness. The rhythm of the stars, the enigma of corals in the depths of the oceans, the labyrinths of synapses, the mystery of mycelia. Flora embracing fauna, a ballet of microorganisms. The aftermath of the primordial bang, the blending of space-time as in states of expanded consciousness. Everything burns, flows, the earth shakes, the wind blows. Chlorophyll, horsetail, jungle. Cells rushing towards the light. The whispering world, the shouting world, the flowing world. Panpsychism.

To be close to Kamila Ženatá’s work is to be close to permanence and change. Faithfulness to the essential and the tireless search for new expressions. The play of perspectives. Exploring the positions of the observer and the observed to the point of their fusion. This process has become Kamila’s destiny, which has now led her to a new initiation.

Her lifelong artistic search (rich in genres, means of expression, processes, techniques) is a pilgrimage beyond the boundaries of duality. Beyond the division of reality into subject and object, sacred and profane. There is only one reality – and it is in constant dance. Kamila passionately and patiently explores the very quintessence of life, that sap flowing through everything manifest, from cells to dreams. Like shamans, she knows that God has a thousand masks.

The psychedelic atmosphere that her monumental paintings exude is not accidental: the paintings get straight to the point. No ornaments, no decorative effects, no pretended overlaps. At the same time, they defy clear interpretation. They are and are not abstract, dynamically intertwining and overlapping natural and metaphysical structures, creating a kind of structure of structures. The branches of a tree whose trunk is the archaic axis of the world. Their composition is not rational, but intuitive. Their source of inspiration is quantum physics as well as astronomy or Taoism.

The main thing is to convey the experience that everything is one complex agency. In the words of the painter Viktor Pivovarov: „Her latest paintings seem as if they were not the work of a human hand, but were created spontaneously, spontaneously. Kamila has freed the language of painting to speak for itself, to give colour the opportunity to live its own life. She stepped back as an author, became a mediator through which energy and meanings that transcend her pass.“

Whether she is traversing the starry sky in her mind, exploring the wilds of vegetation or delving into the depths of the unconscious, whether she is meditating or imagining colourfully, whether she is observing earthly or cosmic events, Kamila searches again and again for the imaginary fulcrum of everything. That eternal source, which is immobile and out of time, and at the same time in time and in continuous movement. According to the Zen masters, form is emptiness and emptiness is form. It is the great paradox that shatters the possibilities of language. But not the possibilities of the image.

Milan Ohnisko

Curator: Filip Kazda