Matúš Novosad: Drawings
We cordially invite you to the opening of the exhibition of Matúš Novosad, a teacher from the painting Studio Delta, entitled Drawings, curated by Marian Zervan, head of the Theory and History of Art programme.
Where?
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The Záhorie Gallery of Jan Mudroch in Senica
- Sadová 619/3, Senica
When?
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Opening: 31 January 2025 at 5.00 p.m. (Music guest: Katarína Máliková)
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Duration: 31.1. - 16.3. 2025
Curator:
Marian Zervan
Author about the exhibition
The exhibition presents a selection of four series of drawings that bring together issues of painting creation. The oldest series consists of twelve black watercolours from 2019. They move between abstraction and humour. They are complemented by a newly created large silkscreen that reflects the mistakes made in the early days of ink painting, opening up new meanings of interpreting the work. Perhaps the most extensive part of the exhibition is a selection of fifty Charcoals (2022–23), mainly themed around the construction of figurative compositions – from bathing, to relationships, to suffering. These are virtually followed by intimate portraits executed in red ink, created in 2023-24. Approaches to drawing as a principle of painting are rounded off by ink paintings that focus on a mother and child, the gradual emergence of the image before the viewer's eyes, and the conditioning of one part by another.
Curatorial text for the exhibition
Exhibition of Mgr. Matúš Novosad, PhD., painter, curator, theoretician and art critic, presents a selection of his work from the years 2019 - 2024/2025. A graduate of Klaudia Kosziba's studio, a graduated PhD student at the Department of Theory and History of Art, a contributor to the magazine Glosolália, and currently an assistant at the painting Studio Delta at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, he focuses on contemporary painting with the overlaps to the past that he finds in it, and he deals comprehensively with the painter's handwriting in particular, and with the handwriting in art in general.
Therefore, it is not surprising that in the Záhorie Gallery of Ján Mudroch he presents with drawings, where the handwriting - the combination of figurative thinking and the hand - is in a state of birth. Drawing is sometimes reduced to a preparatory sketch, a diary sketch, or an initial layout of a composition or a record of a search in the original ancient Greek sense of ichneography. Matthew Novosad subscribes to the original sense of drawing as a complex of searching or even dilution, of fishing out and pulling or drawing (drawing) vision through the signs (Zeichnung) of finding precincts (drawing). It has no ambition to develop subdivisions of drawing. His drawing is in the true sense of the word transversal and polycentric, passing through all its compartments, and the author does not want to hierarchize any of them.
However, one may doubt. Does not Matúš Novosad himself present us with some division of drawing after all? For example, a classical division through the medium of drawing? And indeed, it seems as if in 2019 drawing in black watercolour will predominate, followed in 2020-2021 by drawing in charcoal, then drawing in red and finally drawing in ink. But from the other side, all these media divisions are monochromatic and interlocking within and between each other. Or is it a division not only of drawing, but also of drawing into figurative and abstract? And indeed, Matthew's drawings convey to us - or as Marcel Proust would say - convey from appearance to duration, in different ways, the possibilities of articulating figures in a twofold sense: in the first as figures emerging from the clusters, and in the second as figures of the clusters themselves against the background. But some of the figures are, in turn, residual "errors" (aberrations) or fragments that seemingly lose their recognizing contexts, even though each of the isolated stroke curves carries them in its own drawing memory in two modalities: a modality historically resonant with the history of drawing, and an autonomous or self-contained modality that can be reconstructed from its authorial ontogeny.
Matúš Novosad is inclined to helpfully call these ongoing drawings in a state of duration also abstract, but perhaps they are only informally informative. In any case, they are not Deleuzianly figurative, i.e. those that distort shapes or figures or merge them with the background. But where does the unifying force of the drawing come into play in this case, and how do we identify it, how can we understand it? This is where the aforementioned transversality of Novosad's drawings comes into play. Each of his exhibited drawings is based on a multiplication of perspectives and expects to be shown through characteristic lines of varying lengths, curves of curves, semicircles, varied densities and gradient intensities, yearning for coherence and abruptness through all connections and alliances, but equally for freedom and release - which is why they cannot be described as figurative or abstract, nor as figurative. The tension and pathos of these drawings is dominated precisely by the transversal and eventful, nascent, explosive-implosive happening. It flows, shrinks, explodes, disperses into different directions and shapes, and in turn seeks a self-contained confluence.
Finally, Matúš Novosad himself divides the exhibited drawings into certain iconographic units. The transversality, which has already been expressed several times, blocks the possibility of giving each drawing a name, but it does not prevent the grouping of drawings, their differentiated arrangement under titles that allow for several drawing solutions: private, portrait, love, motherhood, eroticism, bathing, suffering, war... They promote transversality because they can be drawn as states and births of shapes in their singularities and multiplicities.
They take on a different hue in the reduced number of lines with their forces of coherence, which can be a madonna, and another in multiplication, in fireworks of pentimenti, incomplete arcs, swinging rhythms, labyrinths of unexpected density that know no boundaries, leading us out of the figurative fallacy and announcing: we are not a madonna, but we are states of unrepeatable and infinite maternal love and we give everyone a choice. And perhaps we are something more, perhaps the source of life itself in all its forms. Follow and look for our footprints for this finding of lines drawn thoughtfully and yet differently is the element of drawing.
If I myself were to add one more division of drawing, which has already been discussed here - but rather between the lines and in allusions - then I would add that drawing has a life of its own, which meets the life outside the drawing. The former is pictorial and the latter is counter-pictorial or providing an unfinished and fleeting imagery that either reaches us or fades away. Therefore, it is extremely important to continually explore the life of the drawing, to open the door (Hebrew dlat or Proto-Semitic delet) to it, so that the extra-imaginative imagery can reach out to it and provide it with ways and possibilities of coming to terms with it. This is what Matúš Novosad is trying to do in various ways and perhaps also in the Delta studio.
His long-term interest is public space, the legacy of socialist architecture, but also contemporary building interventions in our immediate vicinity - all of which he treats with critical evaluation, recycling existing materials and objects, often with ironic commentary.
