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Pragovka Gallery, Prague
19.01.2023 - 30.03.2023
Foto: Marcel RozhoňThe image of a little big girl floods the surrounding space in a
bit listless way. The hands that grasp or let go are like moths
trembling in the white light. Subtle but intense, sometimes
nostalgic drawings depict characters often without a clear
background. They stand outside the time and space,
persistently acting more like fading memories. Often, there is
something wistful about them, because of the source the artist
draws from – be it photos of missing Latvian children (I miss
you series) or the family archive, which captures irretrievably
lost moments. Laimdota Malle herself says that she is
interested in elements with missing information and subjective
reconstruction of reality. Hence her fascination with
photographs, the meaning and content which can be shaped in
new ways, including work with casts of something from the
past – like movement or bark. The theme of the installation
named OOZE is not only disappearance and decay, memory
and the past. It is primarily the effect of time and human
imagination, as shown in untold stories, fantastic bluish color
tones and some hard-to-identify objects.
The imprint of remains present in Laimdota Malle’s
work, although the man becomes emotional rather than a
rational being, that is blending rather than ruling. The work
raises questions about how we process and transform
memories, how we deal with various life experiences and
obstacles. Children, women and animals appear in this
intimate, mysterious, hurtful world. Here, Malle allows a typical
narrative to emerge from the gloomy scene: fairy-tale,
dreamlike, irrational... In her own way, she responds to the
current popularity of addressing the childhood or searching for
alternatives in unfettered nature (after all, she previously hung
one of her projects directly on trees in the forest). All of this
puts OOZE within the contemporary artistic context, where “the
others” and “those marginalized” are given more and more
space, and environmental themes and efforts to abandon
anthropocentric supremacy are more visible.
Whether it is paraffin, gelatin or ordinary paper, the character
of the chosen materials is essential for the tone of the entire
installation. Parallelly, light, darkness and space also become
materials for her. Together, they create the effects of levitating
lightness or translucency, fragility and transience. Today,
Laimdota Malle, like many others, returns to handwork and
experiments with materials. In her works, however, she does
not attempt to dominate the material and shape it according to
preset ideas. Chance and the will of matter are allowed to
intervene in the process, and in the form of the resulting
artwork.Curator and text: Kristýna Péčová
