*1996
In 1929, the surrealist painter René Magritte created one of his most famous paintings, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), on the basis of which we must ask the question, is there a pipe in the painting? It is a pipe, because the painting clearly defines it in the painting, but it is not a pipe, because we cannot smoke from it. Not only the name of the pipe but also the image with the real pipe have nothing in common, even though the word and the image are its pointer.
One of the characteristic elements in Nikola Lourková's paintings are non-specific, hybrid levitating forms of various formations, which are surrounded by a complex or looser background, thanks to which we move in the field of reality and abstraction. This field, which doubles and then disintegrates into itself, creating a homogeneous shape into which we try to fit objectivity, should be the imaginary finiteness of the image. That concreteness and the subsequent subversion of shapes has, in my opinion, a certain narration in the narration. By that I mean that the story he tells may not be a story, as it lacks a timeline flowing from the image, according to which we could retell that particular story from beginning to end, but the image itself can be retold without the need for that timeline, for our mind is able, on the basis of imagination and experience, to understand the story as such. As a result, this may become a paraphrase of Rubin's vase, as it will always depend on which element we choose when looking at it. You can either see black faces staring at each other on a white background, or a white vase on a black background. And so the two interpretations alternate, but they never exist at the same time.
Text - MgA. Vladimír Houdek, text written for a series of paintings Flexible senses.
Nikola Lourková completed her bachelor's degree in the Studio of the Intermedial Confrontation of Jiří David and Milan Salák at the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, where she is currently also continues a master's degree, but under direction of Michal Pěchouček and Dominik Gajarský.
