09.02.23 - 04.03.23
CLOUDS AND HIDDEN CLOWNS
Exhibition view Gallery Maïa Muller – Copyright Rebecca Fanuele
Exhibition view Gallery Maïa Muller – Copyright Rebecca Fanuele
“Domination, domestication, and love are deeply entangled. Home is where dependencies within and among species reach their most stifling. For all its hyped pleasure, perhaps this is not the best idea for multi-species life on earth. Consider, instead, the bounteous diversity of roadside margins.”
Anna L. Tsing – Proliférations (Wildproject, 2022)
Monika Michalko creates magical and intuitive paintings. She rarely starts from a blank canvas. Most often – out of necessity – she covers existing paintings to feel their abyss. She works with thickness – not only of her own images, but also from her memory, her imagination, her wanderings and her fantasies. Inside this unlimited vortex, she draws patterns from the hollow of dreams, from poetic thoughts or real elements. Monika Michalko dives inside what the philosopher Paul B. Preciado calls the “somatheque”. He specifies: “The body is a somatheque: a set of representations, rituals, techniques, standards of theatricalization.” (2020) In biology the soma literally means the cell envelope. It is the place where the data of a story made up of genealogies, emotions, memories, secrets and silences are stored. The artist explores what constitutes her in the past, present and future by painting floating scenes at the heart of which everyday objects (bottles, shoes, vases, lamps, etc.) and living beings (humans and more than humans) act, resonate and
coexist.
Monika Michalko dives into herself to extract fragments, elements of situations that offer no narration, ghostly bodies, frank and half- tone colours, dazzling lights and cavernous shadows. The paintings then invite us to dive in our turn into this encrypted life where some clues collide necessarily with ours. Since her childhood, Monika Michalko manipulates images. Those of her photographer brother, but also all kinds of collected images. From existing images, she develops an idea of a collage where shapes, colours, lights atntdTpatterns articulate with each other. It is a practice that she pursued at the Hamburg art school and that does not leave her current work. The artist says she works “in reaction, since one image leads to another”. From this rhizomatic and emotional thought of
construction springs the marvellous and mysterious part of her plastic universe.
It is commonly said that nature abhors a vacuum. Monika Michalko takes note of this. She multiplies the patterns she organises in a falsely chaotic space. Liquid forms circulate in and between the paintings. Colourful and luminous fluids which instil movements, which stimulate the circulation of gazes and which combine the different motifs present within each painting. These physiological forms intensify the living dimension that nourishes and animates all of her work. Indeed, Monica Michalko incorporates living things that proliferate: trees, roots, birds, roots and more recently corals and aquatic plants. And yet the living and organic elements combine
with architectural components.
The artist structures the compositions by creating echoes, shelters within the territory of the painting: hiding places, undefined spaces formed of light and colour. It is perhaps the question of habitat, in its broadest sense, that runs through Monika Michalko’s work. This work represents alternately and/or in combination interior spaces and mental landscapes where the habitat motif is recurrent (houses, castles, tents, cabins). In the house, in the workshop or outside, we also observe the presence of stylised architectural motifs: doors, windows, stairs. So many patterns that generate deep escapes to other forgotten dimensions, both possible and in the making.
Julie CRENN