Native from the Czech Republic, Tereza Lochmann first trained at the Higher School of Applied Arts in Prague (UMPRUM) before coming to study at the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. Today she lives and works in Paris and Pantin and presents her third personal exhibition at the Galerie Kaléidoscope: “Dans les bois”… until March 2.
The title evokes both a walk and a tale… an imagination populated by creatures and myths. It’s a ballad and a fairy tale. So… let’s take a walk “In the Woods”… in this space that is at once natural, wild and yet secret… where the spectator can return to the essence of things and of himself!
It is not a singular wood but a plural one… since it is omnipresent and multifaceted in this exhibition, just as in the artist’s practice. You must first push the door open, as an invitation to discover what is hidden behind it. A wild horse welcomes the visitor… double-sided… as if one could see through it… like a mirage. The viewer has the feeling of this furtive moment of having encountered the animal. We enter the wood(s) through the cutting, the engraving and the lines which follow the fiber and make it tell a new story. The medium and the subject become one in a mixture of violence of the gesture and tenderness of the material. The relationship with wood has a carnal dimension… a deep relationship between the artist and the spectator… an incision of form and spirit. The whiteness contrasts with the surface of the wood and the brown-black ink which outlines the subject… a bit like a burn.
Further on, there is a herd of mimic horses that move freely from side to side on large strips of Japanese paper of random dimensions. Juxtaposition and superposition bring depth and a feeling of immersion. A shades of browns and yellows create a play of light like a clearing. Wood becomes an evocation through color and no longer in the size of the wood. We only remember the relief and the impression like a memory. Everything is part of a certain monumentality. The motif of the door is found in negative, transferred and multiplied like a print. This accumulation becomes movement like the mirrors of a praxinoscope or a carousel around the spectator. The horse comes alive like a chronophotography by Eadweard Muybridge or the riders by Frantisek Kupka. It can also be a single horse at different times or several horses at the same time. The gallery becomes like a manège in the middle of which the spectator stands like a trainer… Should he lead or follow the movement?
So we get lost a little deeper in the woods and we find a new form of humanity there… an urban and wild hybridization… Here are the canvases where acrylic and wood engraving mix, like a second nature. The abstract and dreamlike horizon is colored like dawn or dusk… and it is inhabited by these half-man, half-animal beings… (and even a few Pikachu). The relationship between man and animal is close. The figures have the body of this ordinary passerby that we meet in the street or the metro but their face is that of a tiger, of an ermine whose fur blends into the clothing… We find the striations of the wood like so many textures or scratches.
There is always an echo between works on canvas or paper and those on wood… like two dimensions of the same subject… a double reality. This double identity continues in the object since a chair becomes a squatting body… a vanity carved in wood like a contemporary tattoo. The seat, the feet, the backrest, the armrests… all the members form a skeleton… an evocation of death as threatening as it is welcoming. What is the risk of sitting there… for a moment or forever? All that seems to be missing is a head at the top of the throne to personify him.
We can still see, among others… as along the path and in life… an immense giant hogweed as majestic as it is dangerous… or even a pisser crouching as if on the surface of calm and sparkling water contrasting with the vision of a bird plunged into intense black… a suspended moment… poetic and dramatic… chiaroscuro!
More information :
https://www.instagram.com/terezalochmann
ABSTRACT MIMESIS 