Dana Tomečková and Peter Jánošík circle around Sphere
Nov 16 2021 — Jan 9, 2022
New Synagogue, Žilina, SK
Artistic collaboration: Peter Jánošík
Curator and author of The Sphere: Juraj Gábor
Thanks to: Simona Gottierová, team of the New Synagogue in Žilina
Technical cooperation: Marián Králik
The fourth exhibition of contemporary visual art within the annual curatorial concept of the project Completing the Sphere / Dopĺňanie Sféry.
We could say that everything started with the Big Bang. Including the conditions for the life of humans who examine all that surrounds them retrospectively. They get to know everything through observing the consequences. In the beginning, there was “nothing and then something”. How does something come out of nothing? I guess it should be more correct to say “something came out of something” … voilà. But I am an amateur seeker. Why do I even dare to examine it like this? There is a childlike curiosity in me, which I was reminded of by Dana Tomečková. She instilled in me its simplicity and meaning through her artistic search, by taking stimuli from everyday life. In order to learn through observation, we need time. In order to understand, we need a click. “Click” is actually an onomatopoeia of touch. When two things meet, they connect into the onomatopoeia click, and it seems to us that what has been created has brought to us the miracle of realization. That we were introduced to something we didn’t have in our heads before that click. Something came to light; it just came out of the darkness, and we see it and even know how to live with it. Like that. Perhaps I’ve already deviated from what I wanted to say and what I wanted to find or bring closer to you.
Such a deviation was also an encounter with another artist, Peter Jánošík, whom I met once at the beginning of summer years ago in Banská Štiavnica, and he “kidnapped” me to a place where I would have not even thought about going. At that time, I was focused on creating a work of land art and was doing local research. But I found myself outside my research. Thanks to Peter, who was circling around other priorities at the time. Out of the darkness of ignorance, he shone light on an overgrown mulberry orchard for me. At a time when I didn’t have time for anything like that, I suddenly had time. He took me out of the center/art, the subject of my focus. He brought me into his orbit, where the laws of a different reality and a different attraction applied. We picked juicy burgundy mulberries there until our hands were completely stained from them. A pigment that you can’t wash off at the first try. I had a click only four years later, when it occurred to me to connect two different worlds, two different life and artistic approaches into one common circle at an exhibition. Thus, the exhibition in the New Synagogue was created, reinterpreting the invisible Sphere. An exhibition about the ways in which one can hold the universe in the palm of his hand. About the consequences of the Big Bang and about the ways of searching and the almost endless desire to understand one’s place, role and reason for being here.
I asked the artists for an opportunity to get acquainted with what they were currently working on. I visited Dana Tomečková’s studio and there I learned about the fall of a small bucket of pigment, which caused a click for the artist. Thus, she began to work with this fall and explosion. She dedicated time to it. Tick tock, tick tock… I did not have time to visit Peter Jánošík in his studio in Štiavnica before the exhibition, but he sent me photographs of colored Risograph prints. The pigment in the bucket was blue, and the prints were blue too. For me, it connected into an exhibition. Both authors created a monumental pedestal for the light gesture of the other. One is in the form of a carefully written text accompanying the visitors through a land in a circle of scattered objects on the ground floor and the first floor of the Synagogue. The other pedestal is in the form of a large paper “bowl” that shows the power of the Big Bang, from which life has spread. Peter Jánošík shares with us on a white surface in various densities a private photographic archive of moments from everyday life to show the consequences of where he came from. Dana Tomečková guides us through a long time of self-discovery, questions, discovery of connections, experiments, sketches, comparisons, diagram drawings… simply essences, ingredients confirming the interconnectedness of the dust particle and the universe. Their spread is divided by billions of years and streams. However, their adoption is possible just like that. A click and we got it.
The artists in the exhibition talk about the maturation that lasts. Tick tock, tick tock… unstoppably. Just like that, endlessly. Dedicate some time to their exhibition. Slowly move from the ground floor up and read their story carefully, because it’s hard to catch up to it with this text. Everything is there. It may be criticized that such serious things were recorded in an often-light tone. But is there anything going on in the universe that has not at least a grain of love and therefore joy in it? E.T.
Juraj Gábor
November 23, 2021
Žilina
The creation of Dana Tomečková’s works was supported by a scholarship from the public funds of SLOVAK ARTS COUNCIL.