Blackout

Lucie Jindrák Skřivánková's (1982) series of paintings created for the Karpuchina Gallery exhibition has the character and intensity of an extreme gesture and approaches absolute darkness. Both literally and metaphorically. At first glance, the graduate of Michael Rittstein's studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague has seemingly negated her previous expression with it, but in fact she has added a new quality to her paintings and opened them up in a different direction. In the last phase, she began to uncompromisingly paint over her typical moody abstractions in pastel colours, dynamised by a dense structure made of plaster pastes, with black. It is not about recycling of older canvases, but brand new and carefully composed works. In this way, it was as if she was really "switching off" her painted energy flows in the sense of a blackout and putting in a different kind of energy.

On the one hand, the dark screen emphasizes the relief component of her paintings, on the other hand it emphasizes even the slight translucency of the ground, so that it clearly changes the view of the visual priorities and the expressive value of the paintings. It adds an emphasis on depth, layering, seriousness and, above all, a cathartic dimension, which corresponds to the theme of partnership and human relationships in general that is attached to the paintings. However, Skřivánková's colorist approach is not denied in this case either, so it is not surprising that she works with different kinds of black paint. One of them is "the blackest matte black in the known universe", which is supposed to absorb up to ninety-nine percent of all light. It was created as an artistic response to Anish Kapoor's exclusive contract to use Vantablack, "the blackest black in the world". The British ultra-black acrylic, on the other hand, can be worked with by anyone - except Kapoor