In Sketch for the Dry Cave, Lucia Papcova records the dark cave that the late Czechoslovak artist Michal Kern was visiting obsessively in the last years of his life. It’s a place where “the sound of the outside world is muted”, as she describes it. Watching the video, though, you have the feeling that it’s in fact a kind of black hole, in the exact scientific definition of the term. It’s an “empty space maybe the size of the Milky Way”, “very distant from our galaxy”, not “made of matter” but of a “different curvature of space”. It is the precise definition of a black hole. 

In a strange way, watching Papcova’s frames of the cave reminds me of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Probably because of Hans Zimmer’s transcendent, quite religious, OST, which resonates for me with the music of the largest pipe organ in Slovakia played by Simon and Mr. Surin. But also because the main theme of the movie is time (“Afraid of Time” is one of the music themes) and Papcova’s video finishes with this sentence: All time is count together now. 

In fact Cooper, the hero of the movie, enters a black hole to try to come back in time. It is an impossible intellectual and physical action, but I think there’s something very paradigmatic of Papcova’s work in that unfeasible attempt.

What’s a black hole? Intellectually it is the perfect materialisation of our limits as humans. It’s something we can’t really observe, neither describe nor represent. It is no coincidence that this new spatial figure emerged at the time of Albert Einstein’s general relativity and quantum physics, in other words at the end of modernity. As I see it, a black hole is the perfect metaphor for the end of a unique referent, an omniscient point of view, or that perfect idea of mimesis and knowledge. It is a void, an emptiness. Within it there are secrets, stories, maybe explanations, but none that we can see or recover. Contemporary cinema starts with that void in the middle of Antonioni’s L’Avventura. Anna disappears and the viewer will never know how, why or where she went. There’s this something missing in the middle of the narrative and the image.

Papcova’s works are also full of this void. It takes different forms but it’s always there. In the silence of A Journey To The Ridge’s protagonist, reading a letter we’ll never hear, just as we can’t read the questions in the installation of The Landscape There’. In the last three minutes without images of Greenish. In the photography Papcova never took during her journey in xxx. In the abstraction of the artist’s landscape pictures, where the horizon seems to disappear — just like it disappears when you enter a black hole. 

But mostly in the use of language (the verbal and the visual). We hear the stories of the narrators, but they never seem to correspond to the description. They’re evasive, elusive, abstract, like they are trying to encompass an impossible reality. There’s something there of Georges Didi-Hubermans’s concept of survival image, that relationship of memory to images where life does not cease to come back, does not cease to survive, and in each survival does not cease to be metamorphosed in different words and interpretations. Didi-Huberman describes these flickering presences, these unstable signals, these intermittent fragile lights as “firefly-image”, after Deleuze and Aby Warburg. In a way, they’re the impossible light that always manages to escape the black hole. Simon’s nostalgic song in I Woke Up In A Valley, the idealistic story of the father in The Landscape There, the invisible word carved into a tree in blossom in Spring After 33 years. All the personal testimonies that merged with big History and create these unstable narratives.  

Because what is at stake here is another idea of utopia after modernism. A new approach to a kind of truth beyond the idea of representation or completeness. A new kind of images which is not that metaphysical blinding clarity of the horizon. “An image is not a horizon”, Didi-Huberman says, quoting Derrida; it’s “almost nothing: rest or crack. An accident of time which makes it momentarily visible or readable”. That incompleteness, that blurriness is present in Papcova’s works: in the abstraction of her landscape, in the way she imagines the placement of the camera (far away in The Landscape There, very close but off center in Greenish). And in the very interesting triptych-style she often uses and which can be seen as a kind of answer to the modernism-postmodernism question, working on this Deleuzian “disjunctive synthesis” of montage. 

In that sense, landscape presents itself as a mix of redemption and hope, always symbolising an inner paradox. We’re struck by the visual composition of her videos, where the calm of Nature contrasts with the story or the narrator’s voice. Again, the traces of past tragic events or historical times always appears in a very tangential, suggested way. Papcova is there to let things happen, as she says, to be recorded and observed, but never for a purpose or to impose a meaning. And the link is often done by the counterposition of image and language or the complex visual composition that seems to hide its secret.  

In 2013, an antiquarian called Serge Plantureux discovered what seems to be a new photograph of the French poet Charles Baudalaire. In the picture, we can see a man posing in the foreground. But on the top left, in the background, we soon notice a blurry, faded figure hiding behind the curtains. Some specialists say that is Baudelaire. We know that the French writer didn’t like photography, that decadence of “modern realism”. But maybe, in that strange game with the camera, he could imagine an image that does more than merely reproduce Nature. A way of creating its own technique and expressive mode.

In The Landscape There, we learn about a father talking about his son, falsely accused and sentenced for a murder, and how it destroyed his family and wife. But you can also notice on the bottom left, far away, what seems to be a happy careless family playing and enjoying. They’re also taking pictures of themselves. I don’t know if that was a conscious choice by the artist or the banal coincidence of recording an arbitrary moment of reality (I don’t want to ask).