Under the fine smoke, a dream lived, of a day slept, I grow under the cloud.
The most natural painting in nature is the camouflage of animals and plants. We learn great perceptiveness when observing game. This is the strength of the painter Kateřina Ondrušková. Her sensitivity is and always has been transferred to the retina of the observer. There is a mystery lurking in her paintings. She has moved away from their primal stories, which she told in paintings of talismans she collected and found, to more layered compositions. She replaced the straightforward alla prima technique with a more structured
technique of translucent valerian sfumata. From the transparency of immediate messages and objects, the contours gradually melt under a layer of smoky mist that softens the meanings. Kateřina likes to play with this and situate untold stories in the canvases. Jinotai teems with palette centred paintings with purple and pinkish pigments amongst the delicate wings of colourful butterflies and birds. A sliver of hope lurks beneath the woody branches and the gentle breeze of green leaves that bring human memories to life.
In a new series of paintings titled Golden Hour, Catherine's canvases are infused with the sun's heat and warm colours. Beneath the peeling back of each stroke of the painting, figures of children (teens) emerge, enjoying their unencumbered presence. They are dreamy and without a heavy conscience. A recognizable symbol of camouflage is the visor, which protects their faces from contact with the viewer. In the case of animals and various creatures, the artist uses their natural colouring and wild fur.
Kateřina likes to put her mind into the characters and enjoys the carefree existence under their hidden expressions. However, she doesn't like to admit everything she is thinking when she gets into painting. The figures are engulfed by the various elements, as if only their constitution has accumulated in colored atomic compounds - "colored balls and lines" - burning in the straw, rippling in a haze over the soil, evaporating over the treetops, fluttering in the light under the clouds. Thanks to these atmospheric phenomena, the artist envelops concrete objects and transforms reality into her own imagination. Under the application of brushes, sprays or stencils, the painting acts as a seismographic diary, recording the relief on the earth's surface with imaginary bodies. The poetics of the mundane is very vivid and brings to the forefront the emotions that awaken in us the dejavu of moments of days lived.
Like the Austrian artist Martha Jungwirth, who starts from nature and reveals an intuitive space without the intrusiveness of real objects, the intuitive painter Kateřina Ondrušková delves into abstract canvases. In doing so, we deliberately get under the brushstrokes and into the artist's cognitive thinking, allowing us to experience the same adventures while observing the painting as she does while painting it. Under her brush, even flowers bloom at night.
Curator: Karolína Juřicová
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