ART, APPARITIONS, LAND AND LIVES

TRACING LINES

Pálína’s art is rich with expression and emotions mediated mainly through colour. In paintings of faces she draws the many faces of the human being, capturing ideas of how the individual is always seen through many layers of cultural influences, family, status, situation or surroundings, emotions and ambitions. In this way the artist creates a space for the viewer to reflect her or himself in the pictures, using the diverse faces to examine emotions and positions toward her or himself and others. At the same time Pálína is examining space in many of her works, particularly those that lean towards the abstract. They evoke possibilities of landscapes and lines – ways travelled by people through the roundabouts of nature as well as the streets of cities and towns. Nature is continually on the move powered by the lush use of colour and texture, creating tension and indicating flow that often seems about to burst out of the frame. In the same way the faces, sometimes grouped together, flow over the large planes of the paintings, and between the smaller pictures, often shown together in groups. The installations of faces in narrow dark spaces demand strong reactions and even illusions as the apparitions seem to hover in thin air, willing the viewer to be alert.

These hovering faces and inquiring lines conjure a similar feeling as the one described by the imagist Ezra Pound in a poem from 1913, „In a Station of the Metro“ : „The apparition of these faces in the crowd / Petals on a wet, black bough.“ 

Pound’s poem describes faces that appear in the masses formed in the travelines of cities and draws together the two main themes of Pálína’s art, the city lines and natural landscapes, and faces, sometimes fleeting, others similar to each other due to relations, ties or emotional effects. Here we also see the strong thought behind Pálína’s art, as each exhibition has its own ideological foundation. When the exhibitions are listed together they form a landscape, apparitions and lines, they interact and are in a continual dialogue. A clear process in the works is traceable, based on analysis, research and scrupulous work with ideas and phenomena. Part of this work is the conflation between a personal experience and how the human being and her or his surroundings are the progeny of complicated inheritance, genetics, history and society. In this way the artist is continually dissolving traditional borderlines and providing her art with fresh courses.