Terra Oblivionis - The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague by Liza Libenko 20.6.2024 - 30.6.2024

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Liza Libenko's artistic work is characterized by a subtle melancholic emotionality in combination with heavy and rough materials such as iron, concrete, asphalt or dry branches, where each canvas is half a battlefield and half an open grave. In the painter's paintings, as in a gladiatorial arena, the Object (physical form) and the Idea (mental form) compete, and with them two different ways of being, i.e. Being to decay (Sein zum Zerfall) for matter and Being to death (Sein zum Tode) for spirit. However, decay here is not understood in the sense of degeneration and death is not considered the annihilation of the individual self (the extinction of Dasein), but rather as a Heideggerian confrontation with the limits of one's current presence and an opportunity to acquire new possibilities of existence.

An occult ritual takes place on the canvases, when the painter-magician, with the help of invocation of a special spell (in Libenko's case, these are poems by George Trakl and Charles Baudelaire), opens a portal between the earthly sphere (fainomena), and the sphere of things unknowable to us (noumena), after which the world of eternal ideas physically manifests itself in the perishable world of matter. The paintings move from two-dimensional canvases to the third dimension, wanting to penetrate the realm of people and then fill and absorb it.

This is not so much the author's nihilistic pose as the message that material world brings just disappointment and disillusionment, while a person can be happy only on the metaphysical plane of his own spirituality. All this in connection with transpersonal psychology (Ch. T. Tart, S. Grof and K. Wilber) dealing with the expansion of consciousness and experience beyond the framework of objective reality, similar to the way protruding wires and diseased roots spread from the space of the author's paintings.

Matter (res cogitans) is understood in Libenko's gnostic concept as pathological substance that binds the mind (res extensa), which must pull the cart of the low instincts, Thanatos and Eros, in the harness of material numbness, as depicted by Josef K. Šlejhar at the end of the book The Melancholy Chicken. The biblical book of Ecclesiastes already discusses transience and the disgust that stems from it: "All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. [...] I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind." The author deconstructs the sterile rationality of the current technocratic era, when we intoxicate ourselves with the intellectual ornament of statistical graphs and encyclopedic knowledge, without bringing any new knowledge about the true meaning of things. Therefore, Libenko returns to the anachronistic vegetative motifs of the flowers of evil, symbolizing the corruption and disorder of our postmodern era, in order to sow new seeds of a brighter and more hopeful future.

– Kamil Princ