Denisa Lehocká
“Spatial collages,” as Denisa Lehocká calls her works, resemble building sites, scenes conditioned by a place and given situation. Rather than activating any political or psychological subjects, these works by her animate the essential perception of self. They envisage the viewers’ physical movement in space; an act of active perception. This movement unfolds along the vertical and horizontal planes, reminiscent of walking in the open country. French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty has written that the eye is an organ that is not isolated from the rest of the body, but rather observable by us
via our sense of touch. A given scene’s constellations project the dynamic relationships between detail and whole, micro- and macrostructures. The material elements, drawings, objects, and drawing diaries are arranged in meticulous meta-compositions, much like words in sentences. It is as if the artist had impressed emotional patterns onto space. The objects on the floor need not be physically heavy; they are still burdensome. The objects high up in the air need not be physically light; nonetheless, they float with ease. The suspended objects balance out the inquietude on the level of the horizontal order. The table is a boundary. What lies beneath diverges, hides, and rearranges itself. The viewer’s perception is confronted with the structure of shapes—soft and hard, angular and rounded, sharp and blunt, regular and amorphous, concentric and diffuse, layered and voluminous, open and closed. They “stitch up” the space from the floor all the way to the ceiling. Though her works seem static and taciturn, they encompass both movement and stasis, concentration and release, inhaling and exhaling. Each thereby forms a narrative sequence or series of lyrical episodes made of sets and subsets that constantly either permeate or are permeated are entered or exited, expand or wane. Emotions are controlled by the use of primary colors, by contrasts between shapes, and by the dominant whiteness of the plaster. Lehocká not only counterbalances post-media-centered contemporary art, but can also draw on her thoroughness to amplify that position. Moreover, she refrains from using conventional titles, leaving the thematic dimension of her art open to interpretation. D.G.
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