Jana Vojnárová

The human figure has been a prominent motif in the art of Jana Vojnárová to date. Her expressive painting style and the consistent sense of a kind of blurriness and its distancing effect furnishes her paintings with a flat pictorial surface, behind which, like the view through a rainy window, lies an elaborate visual space. Although direct contact with the artist’s brushwork thus separates us from this figurative visual space, the barrier is two-dimensional and beyond it we can divine the full-blown pseudo-narrative of the bodies and creatures that inhabit these spaces. By playing with figurative relations in the composition in some paintings she arrives at a looser, almost abstract accentuated version of her painting style, which brings out the airy quality of her tricky technique. The genre-aspect of many of the more really depicted scenes call to mind the ‘punctum’ we’re familiar with from photographs. Here the photographs are certainly a frequent source of inspiration, but equally apparent is the artist’s ability to recast their ephemeral quality into a more firmly constructed figurative and compositional situation. This interest in working with the lexicon of figurative gestures and scenarios is illustrated well in the artist’s collage work.