Written by Kovács Ágnes
Translated by Zoltán Bartko
FiguratiF Gallery, MaJel Rovás Centre, Alžbetina 42, Košice, Slovakia
From 10 January to 5 February 2019
In her first own exhibition, an emotive, significantly sensitive, intuitive painter speaks to the public. The key motive of all presented works is the woman. In the line of self-reflective characters, the author seems to tell her own personal stories.
She sets the viewer into the role of an observer of freely processed topics, revealing a kind of intimacy of privacy but also of the internal character of women.
For the visualisation of the experiences, as one of the ways of self-knowledge, she prefers to use female figurative elements. Čičváková is most interested in maturing women and the things that maturity and the internal world of women are interrelated with.
Almost every painting in the series contains a lone figure with views of a certain part of the body - details of female legs, hands, lap, half-figure, headless figure - evoking the seeming deprivation of one′s own identity.
Čičváková′s paintings carry emotional impulses, with a strong confessional meaning. The author makes them taste like narrative rituals, expressing the fact that she does not copy herself but she is keen on finding something more - answers to questions of relationships.
In addition to the directly expressed images of intimacy, her artistic interest focuses also on the things going on in the background. She uncovers interactions with partners, including all things brought up by and belonging to partnerships. Even if we can never be sure, when and why a relationship will end.
Denisa Čičváková has been an active member of the Košice painting scene for almost a decade. It is also worth noting that the smell of paint and turpentine was a close companion of hers since her early childhood.
At first, she improved her talent with the help of her mentor and father, painter Michal Čičvák, member of the Academy, in his studio. This became her "lab", where she improved her skills in terms of colour usage, composition precision and artistic finesse.
"I do not copy my father, even though he is my idol and inspiration. I keep on adoring him, though I want to put my stories and my own soul on the canvas." (Denisa Čičváková).
She belongs to the younger generation of painters from Košice. Her works represent a broad spectrum, focusing on figurative painting. In her lyrically tuned works, she also deals with spiritual and social topics.
She uses painter′s gestures as cultivated construction elements. Her primary painter′s space is the canvas. She emphasises both technical and technological qualities of paintings.
The initial moment, emphasising the emotional expression, the accented details, preserving the uniqueness of her own painting style, respecting the depth of the meaning or idea of the depicted matter are important priorities within the artistic and creative process of Denisa Čičváková.
