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Lucia Tallová

Pebbles as black as jet falling from a photographic face; a paper veil modestly lowered on a painted nude body; the part of a skirt as long as half-opened of a vintage naughty fashion photograph extending out of the frame by the vertiginous crumpled slope of a paper mountain… An omnipresent mountain, which spills out in crumpled and stained paper, flows from the pages of an old book of mountain photographs, or which spreads, in a sublime charcoal trail, in the space of a gallery… Lucia Tallova’s photographic expansions catch the eye, as much by their elegance as by their pastiche audacity.

Thwarting and surpassing all norms (proportions, frames, supports…), hybridizing with a rare delicacy all techniques (photography, painting, drawing, modeling, collage, installation…), the artist (born in 1985 in Bratislava) marries, with an astonishing lightness, poetry and virtuosity, humor and gravity. From the fictitious archives gleaned from old photo albums and magazines, she makes her ground, an augmented reality of crumpled paper, transparent veils and charcoal tears, dreams dressed in stones, pleated, stained and burned paper dresses, and black ribbons.

So, what happens to the photograph buried under these excrescences and coverings, sometimes enclosed under a glass bell?  A fantasy… A sediment aggregating all the ghosts of fear and desire, of memory and oblivion… 

If, in the right line of surrealism, Lucia Tallova operates a distortion of reality and, by the disguise of the past, reactivates all the poetry of it, if it half-opens the door of the dreams, it does not close the door to the senses: its tears of stones and its ribbons call the caress, and its half-veiled bodies give desire to raise or to remove their gangues of paper… However, contrary to the tactile sculptures of the surrealists (the breast in latex foam hemmed with velvet labeled Prière de toucher of Marcel Duchamp, the iron bristling with spikes of Man Ray, the fur cup of Meret Oppenheim…), the reappropriations of the Slovakian artist proceed more from a theatricalization of the look.

Lucia Tallova was born in 1985 in Bratislava where she lives and works. 

In France, she is represented by the Galerie Paris-B – 62, rue de Turbigo, Paris III –

Stéphanie Dulout