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http://www.pnky.sk/rozhovory/denisa-kolarova-je-nacase-pootvarat-zakazane-komnaty-v-nas/

James Papp, Manhattan Micromuseum of Works on Paper

What is striking to the international collector of contemporary art is East Central European art’s acceptance and discussion of beauty. This may well be its defining characteristic among rival styles and its legacy for the future.


In the remarkable evolution of Kolářová’s work over the last decade, she has harnessed and redirected these currents of Vienna Secession, Der Blaue Reiter, and symbolism along with fauvism, orphism, primitivism, and surrealism. There are visual ripples from Klimt, the Wiener Werkstätte, and Csontváry, also, from greater distances, Redon, the Delaunays, Dubuffet, and Miró.  Clear influences by twentieth-century masters, and Czecho-Slovakness, is evident; and also an individual revelations of Kolařova as an artist in color and form.

Kolářová’s art is distinctly East Central European but indelibly her own: sinuous, mystic, rich in color, intricate in detail, and inventive in its combinations of materials. Dragonfly (2008) captures a moment for a feverish insect as Klimt might have portrayed a coolly intellectual Viennese hostess. Tender (2010) is tensed between the painterly and naturalistic, between soothing colors and taut strokes. Schizophrenia (2012) combines humanity, linearity, and a haunting wound with deep textural pleasure. Each of Kolářová’s works makes one think, but never in a way coldly detached from the shapes and shades of real things or from paint and the joy of applying it. They confront crisis but explore beauty even in the midst of crisis. The golden dragonfly (2010) captures by the way it dominates the frame of the picture; its appearance of kineticness in a fixed medium; the detail (particularly of the wings), which is something artists often dispense with in abstractions; the focus of the palette; the contrasting energies of the verticals, horizontals, and spots and the way they also waver in their strength. Thinking about it, it is actually the detail on the body of the dragonfly that is more unusual and interesting.



Roman Hvizdák, PuArt Gallery

To give a better and most truthful description of Denisa Kolářová’ s artwork, I let myself drift with the fresh breeze jazz melodies. By the way jazz perfectly creates harmony with the author's work. The first thing I thought looking at her paintings was their variety of colours resembling feathers and tails of peacocks.  Author’s most dominant language is the expression of geysers of colours that fill up inch by inch each area of her paintings.

Her colourful fingers care golden structures and subtle tones of ivory. A burning and blinding bright orange, yellow and red, and then substituting as a wide range of greenish turquoise, blue and purple shades. It is really impressive symphony of colours and contrasts.

One can find in her paintings a sort of islets that are suddenly formed, strange oasis of peace, through which at one time millions of coloured zigzag rivers, streams and waterfalls flow. A person feels like a wild game between different structures of moves and smudges is happening, all with invisible force of emotions. A wave motion of spatula, by which the author applied fine, clean and transparent colour pigments, accompanies dynamics of moves. Sometimes it reminds zigzag prints of snakes dancing in liquid sand.

If I had to capture the whole author’s artwork with a plain language, it would be these two professional terms: “abstraction and expression". However, not the abstraction quoted stereotypically, but her own, and especially understandable for her. Undoubtedly, in addition to the visual power of images interwoven with colours, her world reveals well-thought form or content of the work. Infinite and inexhaustible themes of nature appear in her artwork, captured in the form of animals, plants, and especially trees. And it is the tree that author binds positive energy and roots of life to. Denisa is calling, screaming into the mystical nature of space and echoes of nature fill her palette of paintings.



Marta Moravčíková

She was born, she grew up, and she creates. This is the beginning of the catalogue foreword to current exhibition. About the painter, Denisa Kolářová (*1975) – apart from her studies of English language and literature at Comenius University in Bratislava and Reflexology in London - can be said that she paints playfully, with joy, in her own private way and still boldly, tenderly, and expressively differently.

To identify yourself with characteristics (that does not define how and from who it is different), or to deny it, you must see the paintings. And then, you should probably consider what it really takes to search for own self and courage to reveal it. And also the courage to reveal something else, as the characteristics of the author in the catalogue ends: “She stands firmly on both feet, having her head among clouds. She can see what others yet can not …”

Artist’s own self-confidence, without which nothing would apparently be reached (Denisa Kolářová is among others a keen traveller - Canada, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the U.S. and Europe), seems to indicate that no one really is able to perceive the way she does. What she sees is being transmitted through the canvases and thus it sends images to the world. Maybe because Denise needs to share all what she sees and thinks and she is too strong to be overwhelmed by her visions only herself.

To share experience, emotion and views on world is human. However not only human; it is just us people who tend to have attacks of persuasion about our uniqueness. Fortunately, art sometimes takes away the blanket from our eyes.