“When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.”

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Through introspection and self-discovery, the exhibition Land of Mystery – or Mysteryland, as the German nonsense poet Christian Morgenstern might have called Linda Klimentová’s paintings – introduces the theme of the environment into Café Fatal. But the exhibition is more than just artistic activism; it is the fruit of long labour by an artist for whom the landscape and a connection to the landscape have been a part of life since childhood. Despite being a child of the big city (or perhaps precisely because of this fact), Klimentová has always been drawn to nature as a source of wise and mysterious power offering protection and refuge to those who, with a sense of respect and humility, understand that they are an integral part of it.

For Klimentová, the difficult time of Covid was a period of transformation during which her work took on ever deeper meaning. The Covid era – when a terrifying virus caused global paralysis in the fields of education, culture, economics and socio-political events in general – came with unpredictable impacts that we are still feeling today and that encouraged many people to reevaluate their positions and values. Klimentová, too, sees new constellations in relation to family, country and the world. She began to examine the space in which we exist and has attempted to find inner stability: it could be among strangers during yoga classes at the gym, where she tries to find grounding and personal harmony by calming the body, or it could involve ‘ordinary’ work in her large garden, where she tends an orchard and grows vegetables. One important imaginative element that has become a strong part of Klimentová’s work is the motif of reflections in the water or against the horizon. The main thing, however, is not just to reflect the visible, but to create a situation of looking at things from the other side, and in this way to reflect the lived reality of another dimension of the open landscape and one’s personal experience with it.

Klimentová’s ambition to capture the transcendent character of existence has led her to combine bucolic scenes with images of the human figure. She first presented this intertwining of people and nature at the exhibition I Am That Lake, I Am That Forest (2022) at Prague’s Vltavín Gallery in Prague, and also last year at Threshold at Prague’s IN Gallery.

Land of Mystery thus loosely follows on her earlier experiments in which she painted encrypted silhouettes in the open air. It reflects the essence of three fundamental overlapping themes that she has explored in the past. The first theme relates to paintings of a landscape bisected by a body of water or the horizon (the triptych Echoes of the Surface or Hidden Shores). The second theme relates to her family’s holidays at a cottage along the Sázava River or in southern Bohemia (Spring, Puddle etc.). The third line of works, existential and surreal-metaphorical in nature, touches on basic questions of human existence: where we come from, who we are and what it all means within the context of an all-encompassing universe (Nocturne – Place of Contact, Strata/Lineage, Gaia Resting, Orbiting Body I, II…).

The exhibition presents approximately fifteen canvases that Klimentová began working on in 2022 and completed this year. These works, which draw on her many years of observation and reflecting on her own philosophical grounding, depict sensitive, atmospheric scenes of distant horizons or detailed close-ups of something like internalised landscapes. Painted in a subtle, luminously colourist manner, they convey the experience of living on Earth in the present, with an awareness of the cyclical nature of human history. On display are finished paintings as well as small-scale sketches demonstrating the artist’s comprehensive reflections on the mystery of existence and the cycle of life and non-existence.

 

The painter Linda Klimentová (1977) lives and works in Prague and southern Bohemia. Besides studying painting under Michael Rittstein at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2000–2006), she also did a study exchange at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca, Spain. Her painting style is founded on a familiarity with European painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She also integrates various stylistic and philosophical tendencies into her work, with a focus on a deeper understanding of the world in general and on people and nature in particular. Working with these foundations, she has developed an airy watercolour technique that she applies when painting with acrylics. Her paintings’ ephemerality perfectly expresses the uncertain and intangible character of memories and mental images of reality. With her work, Linda Klimentová – an artist dedicated to the traditional medium of painting – presents a fresh generational statement regarding a new sensitivity to the landscape and our immediate surroundings, with an emphasis on sophisticated colour and light. In this way, her art offers us a path towards meditation and calmness in the unstable era of the contemporary digital age.