Vila Volman: Observing Joy

Paintings by Kateřina Ondrušková invite us to observe a world that seems intimately familiar, yet something elusive remains within it. In the series of paintings in the exhibition Observing Joy, we repeatedly encounter figures set in natural surroundings. A close-up view of faces promises that we can easily find the key to what they experience in their expression, yet Ondrušková immediately takes this certainty away from us. The faces are often turned away, hidden behind foliage, flowers, hair or the wings of fluttering moths, and the relationships of the figures to their surroundings and to one another likewise remain unresolved. Human figures and animals (birds, crayfish, moths and butterflies) inhabit the painted slices of landscape, but their interconnections must be worked out anew in each image. The subjects themselves are ambiguous too: they may recall familiar stories, mythological scenes or archetypes of great human narratives. Yet they do not tell foreign stories. They draw on her own experience, which she generalises and abstracts until her personal vision of the world becomes an idiosyncratic mythology. It is intelligible thanks to experiences shared across generations and cultures: love, the need to protect those close to us, rediscovering the world through the eyes of a child for whom everything is new. The personal becomes universal here, without ceasing to be authentic.

Kateřina Ondrušková's paintings, with their sensitivity to colour, light and space, enter the architecture of the Vila Volman and let its striking interiors resonate in new contexts. The author's layered, poetic language enters into dialogue with the villa without suppressing its architectural character and genius loci; it helps us perceive it from another perspective. The paintings thus bring an additional layer of experience to each space: imaginative stories unfolding inside and outside, in the surrounding nature.

The images are suffused with warm tones reminiscent of evening sunlight. A soft, milky haze blurs sharp edges and gives the scenes the quality of a memory, or of drowsily waking from an afternoon nap in a meadow or orchard. The scenes unfold in an indeterminate time of late spring and summer, at times with a sense of approaching autumn: a time we recognise not by the date but by light and mood. It is a shimmering haze of passing days, in which the present constantly touches memory. The exhibition suggests that joy cannot always be simply found and named. Yet one can arrive at it through gradual recognition, much as the layered deposits of pigment in her paintings gradually reveal their layers of meaning and emotion.