Ivana Lomová presents a colored canvas of the interior of the room with a precise photorealism style. At the opening of the exhibition, he stated that some of the works were based on his train journey to the Berlin gallery and others in his place. He first shoots a given composition and then oil paints according to the picture, in which he also projects his fantasy vision.
He also speaks of emptiness in the gallery, not only in terms of the absence of visitors, but also in terms of the thematic or even ideological void of the artifacts on display. The same can be applied to such a world.
A significant image could be the Nina II oil from 2015. A young girl, half sad and half thinking, stares out of the train compartment at the long gray mass of soundproof concrete walls. It’s so endless that it looks like the train has stopped. There wasn’t a single hint of it, one disturbing element. The young woman was suddenly so alone in the world, there was no one anywhere, and she wanted to meet someone. Impossible, the void of the world is all-encompassing and at the same time hopeless.
The keeper in the gallery must have had the same feeling (Latest Oil Video, 2015), who was somehow embarrassed in the non-personalized interior. The Reader of Dostoevsky (2011) is a free quote from a famous painting by painter Emil Filla. In his expressionist works, one falls asleep exhausted by the heavy texts of Russian writers. The cross on the wall gives the composition an existential dimension.
Lomová moved the whole topic to modern times, to high-speed trains. Tired passengers sleep in chairs and have books next to them. Perhaps he was simply overwhelmed by the hardships of travel, perhaps he was drunk to make time pass faster (the actors of the Sklep Theater are said to have once said that a person who fell asleep at a party was tired of alcohol).
Emptiness has many forms. Some species can be fun. Sometimes you don’t even notice it, other times you eat it and scratch it. He has good dimensions in Ivana Lomová’s paintings, he does not destroy a person, but forces him to think about the way the world is.
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