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New Meaning

Remarkably consistent in discovering new morphologies and semantic solutions, the artist Mária Balážová continues in her systematic development of a problem she discovered for herself and for us in the mid-60ies. She keeps using the language of geometry and the impersonal grading of coloured planes and lines and finds new forms of communication for her meaningful and aesthetic artistic element – the radically geometrically stylised figure of the serpent. Today the series of her Serpent Geometry consists of as many as forty paintings, mostly of medium sized but we can find among them even large pictures, the largest ones that were created in the Slovak painting. They show the artist’s ability to apply the sign nature of the syntax and colour in the picture and we can say that her large formats represent a really new visual quality...

At the beginning of this creative period the artist, through her intensive working, freed herself gradually of any expression and radically reduced all elements in her pictures – colouring, morphology and the grading of colours. She discovered her theme and named it Serpent Geometry. This was important as it enabled her to single herself out of the classical neo-constructivist art dominated by the autonomy of colour and form and bound in a certain geometric structure. The artist concentrated on a different solution that would allow her to give impersonal grading and morphologic reduction a new meaning. She succeeded in doing so by gradually creating a radically reduced form that can be perceived as an expressively stylised head and body of a serpent. From problems connecting her with the particular chapters of the modernistic avantgardists and the works of artists who expound the message of these till now, she reached a much broader concept that relates to archetypal meanings and forms of culture, remote in space or also in time, but also to the collective memory of the human gender and to making use of the geometric line of modern art. Thanks to the authenticity of the artist’s solution we can consider her pictures to be another confirmation of the fact that painting, many times thought to be definitely dead, can always bring forth new messages.

We can perceive the archetypal form and its various syntax applications, not excluding playfulness and ironical distance, as a certain kind of gender presentation, not dominant from the authoress’ point of view, more likely of a silent presence. The revival of the ornament, a great theme complemented with the meaning of the serpent, is a pioneer work in the Slovak environment and belongs – in a broader context – to the key themes. We can especially appreciate this since concepts trying to re-evaluate the latent presence of the ornament in the modernistic and postmodernistic art as a possible positive quality began to appear on the international scene (most consequently done by Markus Brüderlin in his exhibition and book Ornament und Abstraktion in Fondation Beyeler, 2001). The ornament has been Mária Balážová’s theme for a long time – her Serpent Geometry has already two chapters – she began the second one in the year 2000 and the colours in it are different at first sight. The gentle accord of the grey (plane) and black (line) is changed into a more contrasted black on a red background. This is also part of the change as to meaning, red is the bearer of other connotations and it naturally changed the aesthetic impression of the Picture as a whole. The new colour is connected with the modified syntax. In the past we mostly found groups of four serpent figures, symmetrical to the horizontal and vertical axis, against the grey background. The resulting structure was markedly closed, ornamentation was attained by the consequent arrangement of identical elements symmetrical to the axis. At present the artist mostly works with only two serpent elements, symmetrical to one axis – horizontal, vertical or diagonal, but as a new syntax possibility the impairing of the symmetry may sometimes appear. This is due to the artist’s effort to find new structural and semantic relations of her serpent elements. We identify it in some of the new meanings made visible as sui generis signs. The whole red series shows greater accentuation on the lines – de facto the bodies of the serpents. In the grey series they were subordinated to the principle of dominance of the head, now we can see that the black line can be determining for the division of the plane. The group of such lines can paraphrase a minimalistic articulation and connect the semantic meaning of the serpent and the theme of ornament. We thus perceive the majority of Mária Balážová’s red paintings as more simplified, tending to a lapidary sign that does not lose its ornamental nature. All this is applied in the unusually large horizontal formats (the largest is 300 × 400 cm) that are in Mária Balážová´s case really self-intentional. They are one of the forms how to make the new syntax and colour qualities visible in her theme, in which she joins the reflection of the geometry language to its possible meaning.
 

Jiří Valoch, 2002

Preklad: Katarína Herrmanová