02 May 2012

Gallery Kressling: Kristína Mésároš - Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

Kristina Mesaros belongs to, increasingly distinctive, current stream of young painters, whose productions are evolving individually and without an excessive aspiration to be integrated in the movement of contemporary painting trends and general tendencies. Her creative program is based on the drawing on: personal and internal sources of imagination, her own narration and symbolism. This is the kind of approach which puts first the motivation to express anddescribe the inner world rather than commenting and reflecting on major social issues of today. Kristina Mesaros studied graphics at the Academy of Fine Art and Design in Bratislava, in the studio of Vojtech Kolencik. Later she individually focused on painting which became the main medium of her creation.

Her approach to painting has evolved naturally from a linear, graphical understanding of the flat canvas to today's emphasis on the expression of colour and light composition. Kristínina′s paintings predominantly focus on stories. The most influential, for these stories, has been travelling and especially her longer stay in Indonesia (Bali). Memories and impressions inspire her to create poetic fantasy scenes, in which the natural environment plays an important role and interacts with a figure. A series of paintings titled Hunters and gatherers, which has been created immediately after returning from Bali, has introduced to Kristina′s biography a period of painting; moreover, developing the idea of seeking an internal freedom and the reason for being (life, the Universe and everything); especially, by force of children's heroes, who represent our own small discoverers of the lost paradise.

In another, formally and contextually, closely related series, The World Is Not Enough, the author continues to unfold the dialogue between a man and his 'child-imagination.' The country of searching locally unfolds and diversifies even more, anonymous youthful collectors become concrete (but still unknown) people with real faces or, conversely, mysterious distant fishermen and hunters. In this cycle a certain contemplativeness and confinedness of the story is dominant as well.

Quiet places are a series of paintings for which the author sought the inspiration in her immediate surroundings. It is an interpretation of scenes and places that she has specifically searched for in her new living space; thus, making it her own space and finding her own poetry in it. In the new perhaps less exotic reality, she still looks for the escapes or intrusions into the other imaginative world. In her current work, she modifies the existing way of thinking; she is not seeking her ideal in far-flunk countries, but she is trying to find a magical place all around. Kristina is fascinated by mysterious and deserted corners, buildings and spaces disfurnished of their original purposes and contexts. The author sees to encode the stories of the specific places into the images, which are normally overlooked or hidden - an abandoned cabin in the woods, a broken pool or a gateway that leads… nowhere

In the current cycle Kristina has concentrated once again on the figure, a person who in her earlier works often took the role of formal staffage placed in the landscape. A fundamental shift took place in the understanding of the landscape, which is monochromatic and abstracted at the highest possible level. In this cycle the author's tendency to narrative is significantly present. Despite the fact that the characters do not principally communicate with the audience. In the composition they act as foreign elements, ghosts imported from another world. They are based on contemporary photography characteristic for capturing easy, genre and sport scenes. The paintings are primary representations of joy and 'lightness of being' transformed into an intimate inner monologue or confidential dialogue. The glow surrounding the characters shines like a protective aura that keeps the uninvited viewer distant and does not let them closer to the mystery of the inner world of characters. The issues that the author reveals to us in the titles of works are whispered in our heads. For the moment, the viewer becomes Wender´s angel intercepting fragments of sentences and unspoken thoughts of unknown, long-time absent people transferred to an environment of imaginative landscape full of special brightness.

Kristina Mesaros´ painting challenges the viewer`s imagination and activates the places in his/her mind that appreciate the beauty of the abandoned bunkers and swimming pools, initiates dialogues with silent hunters at dawn or inner monologues with completely unknown people.

Diana Majdakova