Ivana Lomová Stopping at the usual time
The good march in step. Unaware of them, the others dance around them in dances of time. (Franz Kafka)
Wonder at the world! Children are looking forward to school and adults to work. It would be the ideal if it were not a virtue of necessity. Through shock, we are perhaps forced to reconsider our lives somewhat and listen to the breathing of the planet. Have we not become over time runners dashing toward perdition? Jindřich Chalupecký has already stated: Writing and printing in the world is so fast today that the only thing left is to be deliberately slow. Only the wretched boast of working 24/7. One of them, allegedly in the interests of the public good and a better tomorrow, apparently no longer sleeps.
At this time, the painter Ivana Lomová captures the slow, those who hang out in cafes from time to time, stare out the window or wander the streets and pause over the real world. Because in those moments we are not distracted by what is beyond the horizon, but we look to the horizon and into ourselves. A “functioning” person is not enough of a human being. He doesn't live until he stops.
Lomová’s paintings are like a stop on the way when we come to each other. This often happens on her canvases, in the profane space of everyday life, when someone puts on headphones or flits along a cell phone to ward off boredom. When someone stops on the street, on the train, at the bus stop, in the waiting room, or in a cafe. Ivana Lomová offers a redemptive alternative to ordinary, lost moments - remaining alone (with) yourself in silence. Then rolls of feelings emerge unbidden, memories or even relief from thoughtlessness, thanks to which something calm can come to us again.
The painter does not consciously follow artistic trends, genres or even her predecessors. She is guided by intuition. After all, she did not study art, but architecture, which she never did professionally. Although she paints objectively, that is, realistically, reality and photographs are just a sketch for her. The life she touches is neither desperate nor happy; it is an adventure in a free world to which both belong and in which we are fortunate to live. Her paintings do not evoke sharp emotions, but rather a necessary dose of nostalgia and melancholy. The sober size of the canvases proves that the grandiloquent is foreign to her.
Ivana Lomová paints in cycles. She has created sixteen in the last twenty years. From the series of paintings Solitude, Passengers, Cafés and Prague. I chose mostly the ones without people. I followed the artist’s long-standing tendency to do without people on the canvas completely. The figures and their imagined stories distract us. Her paintings without a living being are not dead, but rather a reminder that in the end we are alone in the world and it is perhaps better to accept rather than conceal it.
In the paintings from the Prague cycle, the painter reconstructs the world of her childhood. Specifically, she is affected by the visuality of old Střešovice, where she grew up and still lives. In one of the paintings, she captured the church of St. Norbert, which she had been staring at from the school window for years. Gradually, she focused on details, Prague windows, doors, boxes or stains on the wall. She looked for bearers of emotions and memories, while getting rid of the deposits of tastelessness and returning their original forms to places. According to her, the new places are mostly soulless, see the interview with Ivana Slavická below. Even where they no longer exist, she paints peeled windows, weathered walls, rusted gates, or cracked leatherette seats. It will not strike everyone as charming, but only those who have a more intimate relationship to reality and its accompanying manifestations such as aging. She has kept her city particularly beautiful. She captured it with the passage of time and the distance acquired by her stay abroad. Thanks to this, it evokes, depending on our temperament, memories from the sentimentally banal to the fundamental.
We get used to the places where we grow up and grow old. Getting used to it also means mutually changing. It takes a long time, so it is mostly unnoticed. Ivana Lomová’s paintings are all the more understandable the more we have our routinely familiar situations and places before our eyes. How do these modern backdrops, in which, in the words of Chalupecký, the everyday, the terrifying and glorious drama of man takes place, affect us and what does it say about us? Why does it seem more and more artificial and tasteless than in previous ages? What will embody our spiritual tradition when our native homes have lost their souls?
The painter wants a break from houses again. A baby in the family brought her to other remarkable themes. Ivana Lomová does not fantasize and it is clear to her not just any future awaits our grandchildren. But something unexpected can still happen, as it did 2020 years ago.
Pavlína Bartoňová, Dezember 2020
(Translation Craig Cravens)
Foto: Martin Polák and Marcel Rozhoň
