I
It seems to me that a kind of magical impulse brings to life the opportunity to write something really appropriate about a contemporary’s work of art. I have had certain experiences, and they have thrown before my eyes – for a very specific time, actually – a quite specific way of thinking. Let’s say that it is a feeling of personification of the closest possible order. I dare to write, in a really old-fashioned way, that it’s about personifying the soul of the work. After all, I once wrote out a whole series of supposedly pure souls on a clean A4 sheet. Without the participation of demons, but with their participation as well. The only thing that surprised me was that it was always a format of detail – so to speak. Any kind of detail. So detail as the key to the hidden, the veiled, the lost? Undoubtedly, that’s what I had in mind. That universal, or more accurately written, universal event in the originality of an individual’s cosmic story. The story of his/her consciousness as well as unconsciousness. Certainly to the satisfaction of Gustav Jung, to confirm once more that before the first knowledge belongs the first doubt.
II
About a year ago I became acquainted with a convolute of reproductions of textile works by Táňa Kuzmová. Also, somehow by chance, and they caught my attention. Apparently the needle and thread drawings are worthy of attention. And the subject of a series of large-scale paintings on photo canvas with a broad decorative border of sack-like dignity literally charmed me. That is to say, all sorts of memories have been woven into – or bitten straight into – those soft paintings. They were reminded by photographs of (fondly remembered) representatives of the proud rural middle class, memories interspersed with details of various embroideries and other documents from the home archive. Let us emphasise that from the archive of those unexpected analogies and contexts of special content. Undoubtedly a time somewhere before the end of time and its future. I will help myself with a certain analogy with the photographs of August Sander, an artist who, at the very edge of the Great War, that is to say, around 1910 – 1915, began to “systematically portray and typologize the inhabitants of Germany”. (Hans Michael Koetzle)
III
In the introductory text of the catalogue of last year’s exhibition of Táňa Kuzmová’s work at the Old Synagogue in Pilsen (2023), her fellow artist Robert Bielik exclaimed about the nature of her work as textile alchemy. He made a remarkably summarizing description that honours the diversity of the particular nature and focus of Kuzmová’s “alchemy”. Strange, ironically strange, are the cobweb traces that honor the handwritten gesture of lines and cracks. That is to say, a communication somewhere on the edge of the artistic expression that overwhelmed the art scene of the so-called American abstract expressionists, perhaps the most influential address of the artistic medium worldwide at that time. Finally, the theme of the subdued eroticism of perhaps every one of her textile objects is characterised by irony.
IV
“Golden alleyways” adjacent to the castle filled with the test tubes of esteemed alchemists have always been littered with the sorcery of inventors, experiments and temptations of ahasvers in every way. In short, of the will not to respond once again to futile attempts to repeat the biblical gesture of creation. For example, to write or weave a story once again.
Juraj Mojžiš