Curatorial statement
Midnight Bloom, an exhibition in the Regional Gallery in Prešov, Slovakia, presents the latest work by the young artist Sara Zahorjanová (1991), a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2018). Currently she lives and works in Paris, but her family history is intimately bound up with Prešov, where her close relatives live, and she regards this city as a part of home. Although she has not long been a professional artist, already she has achieved a distinct original style, and her art has a number of forms and faces that complement one another and mutually cohere. Terezie Nekvindová, curator of her Prague exhibition, has acutely observed that Sara’s creative effort is founded on a search for balance: “… everyday balancing of a skewed world: from the search for balance in inter-human relationships, through steadying one’s own mental composure, attempting to find a sustainable mode of life on Earth, striving for justice and so on, to, for example, the banal question of balanced diet. Equilibrium is essentially always fragile, just like our planet and the inner world of the human being.”
On one of two imaginary poles is painting: large format works with an uncommon, astonishing painterly forcefulness, courage and energy that might seem not the work of a woman (and a young woman in this instance). Diverse shapes, trajectories, fragments, surfaces and lines, in differing aggregate states, wrestle with one another on monochrome, almost black-and white canvases; they touch, entangle, and implode. The free play of forms, however, is corrected, as it were, at each moment, rationally and consistently with a fluent hand, and their organic tension inclines towards an equilibration of forces. At the second pole there are miniatures, silent, sensitive (and in places wistful), intimate diary records, which enable us to see into the artist’s inner self. For the Regional Gallery she has prepared an entirely new cycle of painting/objects and assemblages. She has created them in the mode of female handicrafts, by embroidery, assembling stones, corals, glass pieces, gemstones, dried bouquets, everything that contains memories of important life moments. She encloses them in networks, hides them under veils, or scatters clay over them, so that the memorial trace of remembrance may remain, even if “buried”. These also have a therapeutic role of some kind: they provide an act of catharsis/renewal, a way of coming to terms with a painful memory, the loss of a close person or the (irrevocable) ending of love…
Night is full of mysteries, and there are many important things and phenomena that we perceive altogether differently under the veil of darkness and quiet. The metaphor of the “midnight flower” in the exhibition’s title points to the special experience of reality, the sensibility, that is projected into the painter’s works. But it also refers to the paradox that while she as an artist can blossom even in darkness, at night (when she likes best to work), yet that is a time when flowers in fact do not bloom. Playing an important role in this impressive pictorial world are the poems which the artist writes (in English: Slovak translations are provided at the exhibition) and visualises. “On the borderline of actuality and transience” Sara Zahorjanová seeks the proverbial (and always relative) equilibrium of opposites, a relation between the intimately personal and the supra-personal, universal experience of reality; between intuition, spontaneity of gesture and rational thinking. Between the moment and eternity, between day and midnight, with a midnight flower that perhaps, despite all, will bloom.
/ Katarína Bajcurová, 2024
