Mária Machatová — Market Hall — Evening

Mária Machatová in her figurative and realist works presents topics that are usually inspired by her subjective view of the world and places where she moves and lives. As a point of departure for her landscape paintings she takes her nomadic way of life and fully develops the incentives of the genre in her paintings of the seaside scenery of southern France (series such as Landscapes, Salt Lakes, Beaches, Waves).The topics such as sea, beaches, sun, sky and their specific color and atmosphere, however, do not make an impression of kitsch, on the contrary, they are an expression of personal experience and the effort to capture the presence of the lived moment. Other favorite settings that the artist paints are urban peripheries, forgotten corners, abandoned interiors or a sensitive look into the intimate settings of a woman taking a bath or changing clothes.

“Mária Machatová does not belong among the artists who overwhelm us with massive ‘production‘. Her work as a painter is an introspective act of internal self-knowledge, when the moment of persuasion on the definition of form (appearance, visuals, and image) is preceded by the demanding, time consuming study – the act of observation, insight, and reflexive experience.” ¹

At present the artist favors painting based on photography, but in her case, she does not use photography for formal and analytical examination of visualization possibilities, nor manipulates the image in a computer and transfers it onto canvas. “Photography helps my visual memory. Painting a photography is not copying the recorded thing but the reminder of a materialized moment and the possibility to work with it further on.” ²

The painting Market Hall – Evening (Tržnica – večer) belongs into a larger cycle of paintings called Peripheries. It is “about banal places, areas marked by human activity, places we pass by every day but that do not attract our attention in spite of the fact they are a part of our life. They are sometimes desolate and unattractive places like bus stations, blocks of flats, markets. When reconstructing their form and colors on canvas I try to rebuild lost harmony, to create a certain sublimation of bareness. It is however, not idealization, nor social criticism.” ³

The oil on canvas depicts a view from above of the Nitra marketplace / market hall, with its typical colorful tents covering individual stands that are well visible from the gallery above the patio of the former army barracks where the city market hall is situated. The point of view is subjective⁴; however it can open up to any visitor of the place. As the title suggests, the painting depicts the market place in the evening, when all business is over, when sellers and buyers already left the place that is usually crowded during the day. There are only empty tables and shelves, silence of swept lanes between stands, shut sun blinds. The absence of people and goods and the light of progressing dusk brilliantly captured by the artist add up to the melancholic atmosphere of the end of the day. Draperies of tents accurately painted, sun blinds, their typical striped patterns, lively colors of tin roofs create interesting geometrical compositions. These elements counteract the melancholic mood and complement the painting with a positive emotion and hope that after a night’s sleep there will be another day and the market place will be again filled with life.

In this as well as in other paintings from the series Machatová captures everydayness of peripheral zones and banal places, but thanks to emotions that she transposes onto canvas these places look familiar and thus we can discover their hidden beauty.