Shipwrecked Mind 

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The exhibition is an assemblage, a staging, an expanded painting, and at the same time an intimate space. The works reveal aspects of our perception of reality that operate beneath the surface of consciousness like a kaleidoscope of images. The unconscious part of the mind is a repository for our life experiences, feelings, relationships, and conversations we have ever had, as well as a database of inherited experiences from our ancestors to which we no longer have direct access. 

Paintings represent a subdued inner dread, delight, reverie or a vague memory. It reveals moments from the inner landscapes of the unconscious, inhabited by beasts, animals and humans, by hybrid beings in an ambiguous relationship of closeness. Characters embody what we don't tell others about ourselves, what we don't talk about, sometimes out of shame, sometimes out of fear of being vulnerable, and sometimes out of an inability to express and understand what is going on inside us. 

In her painting process, Štefanigová allows a "shipwrecked mind" to surface, one that is full of uncertainties, inner demons, and inner wonder, which change over time and merge into her paintings. The principle of fluidity is present in the anatomy of the portail of the displayed beings, and in the way of exertion of each artwork. The author repaints, cuts up, and re-stitches already "finished canvases" into ever-new sceneries. 

The destruction and remixing of older paintings is both a way of personal inventory and yet an outlet of frustration, over the amount of material created; a desire to free oneself from the excess of impressions and feelings that are reflected in one's own work. Our inner landscape is never complete, it is constantly changing, and therefore every image can only be a snapshot, a glimpse into a particular state. 

The gallery installation is a stage that allows us to enter into moments of this unconscious landscape. The visitor navigates throughout fleet impressions, fluid and yet seemingly frozen. The scene is a form of intuitive interface, an immersive walk through the landscape of a book; sweet and innocent as in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, or dark and complex, so-called "properly adult" as in Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. The experiences that the author presents are known to us all. These are relationships, emotions, and ideas that we all know about, but rarely know how to express. 

The works themselves do not have precisely defined boundaries; the author allows intuition to enter the process. However, working with intuition does not mean abandoning critical distance, conscious evaluation, and the coordinated adjustment of the work/narrative. Spontaneously cut and re-stitched canvases form a collage, and gestural strokes on colored surfaces stitched together into symbolic bodies give rise to hybrid bodies. As felines and horses, beasts, may carry human attributes, lust and pain can take human form. The plot’s gems are hidden in the margins, pearls.  

The visitor becomes partaker in the inscenation, an intimate moment with each object and looks beneath the surface of the structures that hold them up or suspend them. The scenography allows the viewer to look at a glimpse into the creative process, where every stitch and every brush stroke can be pondered upon. It is a form of exposure and deconstruction, where a solid visual narrative can be seen on the front side of the artwork, while the back reveals the materiality of the process and its fragile construction. The consistency of the scene falls apart as you walk through the gallery. The visitor walks across the stage of unconsciousness, which runs in the background and parallel to our everyday duties. Everything is made up of an overloud of sensations, an apparent chaos of experiences that cannot be grasped. 

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links:

​Denisa Štefanigová: Shipwrecked Mind – Invitations AFAD

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Artalk – Denisa Štefanigová v Galérii Medium