Veronika Pausova

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Veronika Pausova, “Scent Charm,” 2018

oil on canvas, 18” x 15” (courtesy the artist and Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal)

Veronika Pausova, a rising Toronto-based star, provides a lively introduction to the full range of her surprising, weird and wonderful paintings in Fast Moving Sun. Composed of 32 works from the last four years, the show’s animated images function as a visual form of flash fiction, where brevity and powerful imagery is paramount.

Her canvases, at the Esker Foundation in Calgary until June 26, have a strong graphic appeal from afar, and action is captured in a moment – or imprisoned in a time loop. As in flash fiction, the characters are limited, but may reside in clothing or even an architectural element The first-person voice is strong, evoked by details like chewed fingernails, disconnected ears or inflamed knees. 

The narratives contain a twist: in the paintings, relationships shift between figure and ground, form and shadow, abstraction and figuration, as well as between neighbouring colours. And, like the short-short story, there’s good use of titles with wordplay: Scent Charm, Flaneuse, Wading Sun, Sexy Gloves.

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Veronika Pausova, “Wading Sun,” 2021

oil on canvas, 75” x 65” (courtesy the artist and Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal)

You can appreciate these qualities in digital reproductions of Pausova’s paintings. What you can’t see online, though, is the surface nuance, the residue of multiple steps. With oil paint alone, Pausova employs processes associated with printmaking, drawing, collage and photography, whether the soft pressure of frottage or the immaculate rendering of trompe-l’œil. Each adds distinctive qualities, from initial washes of paint thinned with turpentine, through the removal of pigment via blotting and sanding – or defining a shape with crisp solid colour around a textured underpainting.

Pausova uses her serendipitous grounds as an impetus for image-making in the manner of Surrealist artist Max Ernst. At times, she imprints both shape and texture, as with Scent Charm, for which she pressed a turtleneck onto the canvas. At other times, she might bunch fabric into rosettes and stamp a repetitive pattern, or lay a frayed thread of a canvas onto wet paint to wick up colour, leaving a ghostly line. Happenstance then cedes the playing field for the next stage of image making, one that requires careful control and the addition of hyper-realist imagery, fine lines or glossy shadows. 

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Veronika Pausova, “Flaneuse,” 2020

oil on canvas, 75” x 65” (courtesy the artist and Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal, Claridge Collection)

Elizabeth Diggon, the Esker’s assistant curator, has skillfully organized the show, using as a conceptual springboard the playful, strange and impressive craft evident in Pausova’s large canvas, Flaneuse. It’s a lively concoction. A constellation of glowing orbs set against a dark sky tinged with Prussian blue and dotted with graphite clouds articulates eight string-like legs. Along the bottom of the canvas stride boots with peekaboo toes. 

In Flaneuse, as in other paintings by Pausova, such dislocated parts stand in for the body, but also for the visceral experience of the body’s involvement in gesture, rhythms and routines. Many paintings propose diagrammatic images of sensation. One of the most startling is Scent Charm, a quasi-funny fantasia on the possibility of smell through the prosthetic brass nose of Renaissance astronomer Tycho Brahe, who died in Prague.

Pausova produced the earliest works in this exhibition during a residency that culminated in an exhibition of small pieces at the Hunt Kastner gallery in Prague, the city of her birth. The daily walk to her studio took her through the Vinohrady district, famous for Art Nouveau apartment buildings embellished with stylized figuration and organic patterns. Seven works from this seminal 2018 exhibition are interspersed in the Esker’s show, creating conversations between earlier and more recent works through echoes in colour, patterning and narrative character. For instance, the metallic grey clouds punctuated with mysterious lines in Contact Lens reappear in Flaneuse. 

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Veronika Pausova, “Sexy Gloves,” 2019

oil on canvas, 18″ x 15″ (courtesy Simone Subal)

Fast Moving Sun emphasizes the depth and breadth of Pausova’s visual vocabulary and disquieting syntax. Working within quasi-theatrical sets of colour and texture, she explores provisional relationships with the familiar – the body and its sensations, clothing and accessories, flowers and flies, even urban architecture and mechanized landscapes – concocting imaginative and bizarre scenarios. With the artist as puppet master, abstraction and figuration, as well as control and chance, argue within the implied shallow space of the paintings, negotiating a fragile balance. ■  

Veronika Pausova, Fast Moving Sun, at the Esker Foundation in Calgary from Jan. 22 to June 26, 2022.

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