2015 – 2019, black and white photographs on film, various sizes

Lucia Papčová’s photographs demand attention. A long and concentrated gazing, where an eventual image surfaces from individual recognisable fragments. That remains always, as it were, intuited, without clear contours. Identification demands time and patience. Also inclining us to slow down is Lucia’s interest in contemplation, i.e. marking a space for observation. 

With a concentrated gaze, ultimately we discern a landscape and its attributes. A snowfield on a rock wall, the shadow of a stony cliff, a spyhole into a cave. The theme, despite its deliberate obscuration (or more precisely hyper-clarification, excessive illumination of the image), is important. The author waits for the appropriate light, lets herself be dazzled, and the camera lens captures a clear shining. The photograph, presented in monochromatic colour, records a place; it is the bringing to presence of a moment that one had to wait for. It is an image for which one had to go wandering, and a proof of a luminous situation that will never again recur. Precisely this interest in what is fleeting, while recording apparently changeless landscape sections (mountain walls, forest, cave etc.) is a defamiliarisation of our mode of gazing. It is a prolongation of concentration to the extent where we begin to become aware of our own presence before the image. The object of observation returns us to the subjective experiencing of our own corporality.

When considering the landscape, the dimension of the picture also has its importance. The format of the photograph evokes an open window, through which we are looking at a landscape, and in viewing we become aware of its material aspect also. Sight slides over the surface, till at last the eye finds an identifying sign that can extract a definable form or phenomenon from the abstract structure.

Precisely composed landscapes appear in the photographic images. They confront us with time, testing our patience for recognition of what we see, and in yet another way besides. The landscape emerges on a plane of permanence, durability, as opposed to human transience. Its formation is a matter of inconceivable time, and its contemporary form is the result of diverse transformations. As the Slovak poet Ivan Laučík wrote: “Important in caves is the water that has flowed through them”. In Lucia’s photographs there are slices of landscape which essentially are what formed them. This result of a long-term “creation” is disturbed by an irruption of light, the photographic medium par excellence. The light does not reveal, but on the contrary, it dazzles, and thus the primary theme of the works becomes the one who is identifying: the subject. Human beings, that is to say, are equally the result of their formative processes and events. They are shaped by the thoughts and actions that have flowed through them.

^* Ivan Laučík: Memories of Michal Kern’s Caves. In: Trblet v oku (Glittering Eye). Bratislava: Fragment 2015, p. 96