Ester Knapová
Ester Knapová’s paintings spread a kind of dreamy mood at first sight. They draw us into various remote times and present us with familiar situations that remind of us something. The artist opens up the half-forgotten world of her own past, though it is not strictly speaking only her world. It is, rather, a found form of sharing and awakens the viewer from passivity. She makes us remember objects and moments that were somehow important for the present, even if it didn’t appear so “back then”. A network of involuntary observations, banal objects, corners, hiding places, a web of abandoned places in which Morandian silence speaks: this is where Ester Knapová returns to recall long-obscured connections, connections that shed a different light upon the lived time and that magically transform the seemingly insignificant into what suddenly appears as crucial and essential from today’s perspective. This is the discovery of something lost, but something which at least exists in memory and recollection, and which is therefore accessible in certain ways.
The exhibition Winter Apples awakens a kind of overarching atmosphere by means of its title, while at the same time allowing us a glimpse into the thematic diversity of the paintings, by means of which the artist examines her relationship to time and the passage thereof. In addition to specific childhood memories (Bruslení / Skating, 2023), there are objects (Křeslo / Armchair, 2023) and places (Bodláky / Thistles, 2023; Sad, 2022) associated with the movement of a searching memory and with direct sensory touch, in the intersection of which, and in the blending of internal model and external phenomena and appearance, the poetics of image and painting thrive. Ester Knapová, an outstanding young Czech colourist, creates her authentic painterly world out of an inner necessity to make time present in its elusiveness and instability. She transforms the amorphousness of time into a newly discovered stylistic morphology, which at the same time interprets inner experiential shifts, emotional layering and transformation. She lends time a beautiful form that appears to be an act of creative reconciliation with the melancholy that ticks in every minute that begins, and in every minute that ends for all of us.
