"From the Moon series" Painting

Michaela Maupicová’s (1982) artistic language can be characterised by the paradoxical term ‘meditative expressiveness’, since it combines the two seemingly contradictory approaches of rational constructiveness and, in places, an almost elemental immersion in limitless intuition.

Her pictorial compositions are primarily based on a complex relationship between two interlocking planes. The first of these is a kind of ‘cellular’ level of dynamic brushstrokes or sponge-prints, while the second is an overall system of geometric (integral, modular) configurations and plastic forms. In this approach we can recognise a metaphor of the endlessly interconnected nature of ‘measurable’ reality, from subatomic particles to galaxy clusters. In another sense we can interpret Maupicová’s images as the visualised fabric of the parallel ‘non-reality’ of human imagination in which a specific mental or emotional perception finds a tangible response in abstracted patterns. In Maupicová’s work, the notion of ‘ornament’ doesn’t therefore, have the connotation of something superficially decorative; instead, it has the role of a mutual point of entry between the domains of what is outwardly seen and inwardly felt.

The enigmatic character of Maupicová’s pictures stems from the fact that their modelling and illumination is not determined externally, according to laws of illusive descriptiveness, but from within, according to a free flow of often subconscious impulses. Here, amorphous energy gradually crystallises into structured scenes visible to the eye, ones whose rhythms and depths tell of the discourse between physical and metaphysical states of human consciousness.

Even in Maupicová’s large-format pictures, her expression is grounded in drawing – not simply as a technique, but above all as a way of thinking in which the drawing hand becomes a natural extension of the contemplative mind. In her work we can, in this sense, speak of a process of materialising the space of inner reflections balanced on the ever-shifting boundary between what we consciously know and what we implicitly sense. The monochrome nature of Maupicová’s visual idiom underlines and reinforces her profoundly-felt testimony to the ‘eternal bipolarity’ of light and darkness rooted, since time immemorial, in human consciousness about nature – and ultimately about our own existential and spiritual being.

Richard Drury, curator