Lucia Tallová — Winter Dock IV

Lucia Tallová is an artist with a unique creative program whose foundations were laid back during her university studies. The key aspect of her images is usually a landscape with a unique mood of the captured moment. She focuses on urban, housing and industrial environments featuring fragments of architecture, but also natural sceneries which are often covered in dreamy mist or smog. She is a creative non-figuralist, her landscapes are empty, deserted, often even abandoned. She favours open-air environments without a trace of man, completely absent of him. Nevertheless, her images accommodate rich narratives: “I personally consider landscape much more narratively interesting than figural painting. I have never been interested in being a figurist or portrait painter, it has never appealed to me… My images portray life through inanimate objects like architecture, I find it much more appealing…”¹ Her work is structurally consistent, she keeps returning to her favourite themes, but she never seems to get stuck, on the contrary. Even though she remains solely a painter, her work sometimes goes beyond the medium and overlaps with objects and installations, which, however, also include painting. 

The painting titled Winter Dock IV is a part of a broader series of large-scale acrylic paintings and dates back to the artist’s early creative period. It captures Bratislava’s industrial environment – the port at the banks of Danube which was established in 1897 for wintering ships and it became one of the largest river ports of Central Europe during the period of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Even though it captures a real-life environment, just like in the case of her paintings capturing the Kiev Hotel in Bratislava (2012), the concrete housings of Petržalka (2013) or Hong Kong (2015), the primary focus is not on documenting the scene, but on reliving the emotions related to the portrayed places. In 2016, she digitally transferred one of her paintings into a print for the Čierne diery [Black Holes] project, which documents and presents to the public decaying architectonical, mostly industrial objects in Slovakia which may not be preserved for future generations. 

One of the artist’s characteristic landscape features is her balancing between the abstract and real-life motives. The real-life element is represented by the urban or natural environments. The abstract one is her painting technique when she applies the acrylic in thin, transparent layers imitating the blotting of aquarelle which she uses to create paint drips while the sharp outlines remain unclear. This painting technique, together with the artist’s favourite, almost all-black colour scheme, give the images a melancholic, nostalgic, even dark mood, suggesting unclear, blurry memories or connections with the past. Occasionally, her images may seem romantic, but not sentimental or pathetic. This is true about one of her repetitive elements, an ornamental grid representing a lace pattern she has been incorporating into her images since the beginning of her creative career – and it is also present in the Winter Dock IV painting. She uses a painting technique to transfer the crocheted and embroidered patterns onto the surface of the canvas. When she first decided to use such textiles, they represented a memory link to her past and her childhood as they had been made by the artist’s grandmother. The Winter Dock IV image includes a print of one of the lace patterns serving as one of the visual structures of the painting. As the artist herself states, “my work is based on visual contrasts, which is why I chose sharp architectural elements and industrial fragments, in order to create a conflict in the image. Such contrasts create tension, which is very good for the images.”²

Barbora Geržová
January 2021

www.luciatallova.sk
eshop.ciernediery.sk

Notes
¹ Subtílna spoveď so skrytým potenciálom. Lucia Tallová v rozhovore so Silviou L. Čúzyovou. [A Subtle Confession with Hidden Potential. Lucia Tallová in an interview with Silvia L. Čúzyová] In: Profil súčasného výtvarného umenia. [Contemporary Fine Art Profile] Bratislava: Kruh súčasného umenia Profil [Contemporary Art Circles Profile], 2013, year XX., vol. 2, p. 52.
² Ibidem, p. 39.

Bibliography
1) Subtílna spoveď so skrytým potenciálom. Lucia Tallová v rozhovore so Silviou L. Čúzyovou. [A Subtle Confession with Hidden Potential. Lucia Tallová in an interview with Silvia L. Čúzyová] In: Profil súčasného výtvarného umenia. [Contemporary Fine Art Profile] Bratislava: Kruh súčasného umenia Profil [Contemporary Art Circles Profile], 2013, year XX., vol. 2, p. 36-69.
2) Čarný J. – Geržová, B. – Gregor, R. – Majdáková, D. – Müllerová, K.: Päťdesiat súčasných umelcov na Slovensku. [Fifty Slovak Contemporary Fine Artists] Bratislava: Art Academy – Vydavateľstvo Slovart, spol. s r. o., 2014.