Ljuba Šlechtová, Šimon Jan
Circumstances
HIDDEN Republika
12.3. / 21. 3. 2024
We are delighted to present the 10th and also the last exhibition at HIDDEN Republika, featuring two students of Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Ljuba Šlechtová and Šimon Jan.
Imagine we are near a forest, somewhere near a field dried by the hot sun. In the field stands a small wooden cottage. It is inhabited by strange creatures, perhaps a little frightening, yet they reach out their hands to us and invite us in. Although it is not at all clear what awaits us behind the fence, it may not be so bad.
Wood is a prominent element in both Šimon Jan's and Ljuba Šlechtová's work, suggesting that the material is the link between their work. However, each of them places wood in a different context. Ljuba Šlechtová found working tools at the family cottage with which her grandmother and great-grandmother worked in the fields and did other agricultural or gardening activities. Here the issue of women's work freely enters into a dialogue with the imaginative idea of another, better world. Therefore, the artist disassembled the work tools and then used them to form the frames of her paintings, in which the wood grows under the skin of mysterious figures or objects. Hands come to life before our eyes, our backs laugh, the fence grins at us. It seems to form an imaginary boundary between two worlds, one where sadness and anxiety reign and the other where there is hope.
Šimon Jan also gradually deconstructs the wooden frames, processively burning them, decomposing them. The ashes that remain are explicitly acknowledged on the painting canvas as a relic of what (has) been - and may reappear in a moment. Forest regeneration sometimes has to take place in such a way that the entire forest has to be burned in order for the soil to revive and new trees to grow on it. Destruction here represents a form of renewal and regeneration. On the painting canvas, geometric, deliberately simplified shapes evoking natural processes are layered, also creating certain binary opposites, which, however, permeate each other. The phenomenon of repetition and looping constantly returns us to the beginning...or is it the end? The metaphor of a forest that has literally "risen from the ashes" pervades the artist's exhibited paintings.
With their paintings, both Šimon Jan and Ljuba Šlechtová contribute a critical commentary on the setting of contemporary neoliberal society, whose problems range from the climate crisis to the inability to grasp an abstract globality that demands concrete results. On canvas, Šimon Jan struggles with the rational structures that he determines in advance, but ultimately succumbs to them at the expense of abstract composition. Ljuba Šlechtová builds a wooden fence, which becomes the boundary between the world we live in and the one that is possible, which may also rise from the ashes. The light beyond the horizon slowly stretches out its arms, opens its arms. Let us dream together.
The wood grew into my skin, it was inside me, it couldn't be washed away. There was no escape. Until the wood saved my life.
- Helena Todorová