Eva Sakuma – A long moment between paintings 18.5-15.6.2022
“But soon the shaky white will touch its own skin with darkness...The body has more, more bodies for one single soul.”
(freely translated from Czech)
Vladimír Holan/Nokturnely
The exhibition is based on the common theme of intimate experience and perception of the very fact of the fragility of life in paintings. It is a deep confession of the artist's soul, urgently present in its eternal longing for hope and recurring sadness over emptiness.
One enters directly into the painting, although the figure itself is rather neglected. It appears primarily as a silhouette, a symbol of the presence and nature of the human continuity of birth and extinction. The intimacy of the painting of the closest person adds a delicacy and quiet kindness to the entire depiction. The figure is in an almost meditative position suggesting the stillness of a moment of omnipresent silence. Capturing a unique emotional experience of a fleeting moment of silent communication which could have been a rare but brief moment of harmony, whether between the artist and the depicted, or between the soul and the body of the artist herself.
With the breath of ancient times, the works speak to us nostalgically, and in a mutual dialogue they lead us to necessary reflections in our noisy and proud present. We feel that we are gifted with something that remains in the space of the work. The artist perceives a world without technology as safe, simple, and real. In the old museum wallpapers, the masterful beauty and pain of what has passed, the comfort of the immutability and untouchability of times past, seeps through. The silky surface of each surface of the painting, reminiscent of the brocade edging of a traditional Tibetan thangka, seems to be interwoven with golden threads in a dazzling array of colours that cover every detail of the canvas.
Places both clear and indistinct come together to form a whole that is, however, imperceptible to all the senses. Individuals are necessary for the whole, and the whole without detail is meaningless. The mirror or old chair here, through an eternal space, are the spirit of the one who was once there. The lightly recessed dimple in the seat or the perspectival view into the room suggest the (im)mortality of the characters in the painting's story, their balancing on the edge of two worlds that intersect and yet can never merge. Only in our closest proximity is such an arrangement of space found, in which the question of its finitude or infinity still makes sense.
The very essence of these images is introspective and very personal. The author translates the perception beyond the external form of reality to the mystery of inner processes. Thanks to their lyricism, the paintings evoke a certain impression, and their deliberate ambiguity encourages our minds to search for hidden contents coming from our imagination. The individual details of unreal spaces are mixed in a mysterious system, the rules of which are not even defined by the artist herself. Despite the historicizing elements, the paintings present an overall simultaneous impression. It is a deliberate but non-violent denial of the reality of space and time, which, surprisingly, leads to a harmonious and coherent style of depiction: “The staging is from a museum, but my world is inside.”
Ela Suárez Illerias
