During the summer semester, I continued my long-standing interest in painting as a space of inner conflict and transformation, focusing on the motifs of protagonism and antagonism. The initial impulse came from Paolo Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon. I shifted my attention to the spaces of the boiler room and the smokehouse, places where profoundly intense moments charged with existential significance unfolded. Throughout the paintings and objects, motifs such as the dragon, the willow creature (vrbáč), fire, smoke, and the boiler recur as metaphors for repressed aggression, familial tension, and, simultaneously, the longing for purification. Over the course of the semester, I gradually moved away from a more literal depiction of dramatic conflict towards subtler, more open-ended situations in which I seek a greater sense of hope. Motifs of trees, expansive canopies, and roots emerge as “vessels” for emotion, memory, and embodied experience. The notion of “what lies above us” evokes a powerful sense of the presence of something that transcends us, while leaving its interpretation open to the viewer.
