The Faraway Feels Near

Only when we leave home do we begin, with some distance, to reflect on where our roots are and what has shaped our view of the world around us. It could be something seemingly trivial, like the program Živá panoráma (Live Panorama), a television broadcast of cameras capturing selected, often picturesque corners of the country in real-time, accompanied by folk music. It is repetition that conveys the feeling of familiarity, of home, even from afar – we notice changes not in real-time, but only when they temporarily disappear from our view. After two years of studying in the Netherlands, Paulína Gajerová returned to Petržalka (the biggest panel housing block in Slovakia), where she spent part of her childhood and adolescence in her grandmother’s apartment. This apartment became not only her inheritance but also a grounding point and a confrontation with memories of everyday life surrounded by objects of sentimental value. The stereotypical grayness often used to describe the largest Slovak "vertical village" is disrupted in her memories and in the present by the surprisingly diverse flora and the lives of local residents intertwined in the intricate infrastructure of the district. Paulína humanizes these elements using a vocabulary in which she describes the panel housing blocks as "concrete giants" and processes them in an interdisciplinary project titled Concrete Meadows. As a painter, she reflects on what it means to paint a landscape, what it means for her to paint a Slovak landscape, a Petržalka landscape, an image of it – a hybrid landscape connected with mediated images from local art history, her personal experiences, memories, or television broadcasts. In the series Hints of Fields Past Remain, the artist formally draws from the grid structure of the panel housing blocks, their haptic, still-uninsulated materiality, which she brings to life by mixing sand into an otherwise almost monochrome painting. The individual parts are compositionally interchangeable, becoming literal building blocks of the painting’s surface. The gray base of the paintings is punctuated by flashes of golden color, created not only by separate brushstrokes but also partially by scratches, seeking light beneath the layers of gray. These flashes emerge like memories, brief glimpses, fragmented traces of memory pointing to what was once there before the panel housing blocks – meadows, fields, and gardens. The figure unexpectedly appears here, blending with the dominant color, remaining connected to the place from which it emerges – much like its identity, or rather its contours. How do places, where we have temporarily put down roots, get under our skin? What happens when they change despite our ideas about them? And what if we have changed in the process? Paulína is interested in these ambivalent feelings – of familiarity and alienation, affection and distance, the disappeared and the deeply embedded – which mix and layer within us, creating our own image of a place, one that we carry within us and constantly rewrite.