Advent schism: Jana Palečková & Erika Bader

Jana Palečková originally worked as an administrator and painting was just a pastime for her. She sold her images and objects on Etsy until she was discovered by American gallerist Fred Giampietro. Her need to create was ignited by yellowed photographs on hard cardboard with an embossed studio emblem, which she bought in antique shops, bazaars and flea markets. She was fascinated by the venerable matrons with their jurodivisive looks, the solemn townspeople with their lobed chins, the children in their sailor suits. Nameless people in stiff poses, with strangely washed-out faces and dark shadows around their eyes, challenged her to action: the old portraits seemed to lack something, to withhold something - something that longed to be spoken, here and now and through her. Jana thus became a kind of medium through which qualities, phenomena and situations that a "mere" camera could not depict materialized. And so she began to do/re-do the photos with oil painting, in which she has achieved complete mastery: her interventions are indistinguishable from the original and the integrity of the image is preserved. It never goes against its original meaning. On the contrary, she searches for and finds hidden meanings in vintage photographs. Overpainting is not just a decorative pun, but a rediscovered necessity, a realisation of the original potential. Palečková presents us with likenesses in which the true nature of the person portrayed, with its illicit passions and deviations, has been sedimented, as in Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, who has aged instead of his model, reflecting the sins and transgressions committed by him, while the face of Dorian himself remains fresh, beautiful and innocent. The artist's work involves the automatic mental process so popular with the Surrealists, or more likely with the drawing spirit mediums, who considered themselves executors of the intentions of the intangible entity that guided their hand. But while their strokes were predetermined by an "alien" will, Palečková feels free. She is not a mere tool; she is a playful, creative, ambiguous and often shy actor in the emerging narrative that is born under her hands. "In her work, she emphasizes the liberation of meaning and the truth of materials, convinced that their qualities should remain obvious and largely untouched," theorist Grace-Yvette Gemmel wrote in 2018 about Palečková for Raw vision, the only multinational media outlet that seriously engages with the work of non-professional artists included in the broad category of art brut or outsider art. However, the word outsider here is not necessarily meant in a social sense, but rather as a counterpart to insider - one who sovereignly navigates the art scene and respects its unwritten rules. In this sense, we can consider both Jana Palečková and Erika Bader as "outsiders", because their work really stems exclusively from internal sources that assert themselves almost compulsively, and they do not look for their models in the history or present of established art - which does not mean that they do not find common ground with it!