Antenna Space is delighted to present the solo exhibition of artist Stanislava Kovalcikova, First Rays of the New Sun, from May 5, 2023 to July 2, 2023. The exhibition is not open to the public and is by appointment and invitation only.

The sun ate the second sun; there used to be two, two much smaller suns, one to shine on each hemisphere – east and west. Now there is only one sun that both hemispheres have to share, and hence, night.

Stanislava Kovalcikova’s paintings make a certain demand upon the viewer – namely, a vision that acts as light. A vision that can flow through obstacles, till arriving at a final destination that is undefined; that is resonant upon the surface.

And: always a risk that that surface will be transcended. What lies beneath: more surface. Unlike the sun, the earth is all layers – its encrustations that place where history meets geology. A painting should match that process, and that’s why it takes so long to happen. Fried egg forms a breast, suddenly the sky is red, a distant relative drowns in the sea, and upon the shore, patches of mottled gold infer a supporting structure of decay that endures enough, through its flawed substance, to support and uphold us, despite our fallings – our flailings. Everywhere you might look, it all becomes a landscape – the power of a certain measured mode of looking – peopled by de-mythologized human creatures morphing outwardly into the animals that reside within. Here comes a woman having sprouted horns, riding high upon the bull she has managed to conquer – Europa unvanquished. Face leaking gold sweat onto the brickwork, body eating its way into the sky’s machinery. All paintings have a reflective surface, forcing you to look within while studying these monstrous projections of an externalized self. The sensation of movement pre-occupies – back-and-forth, from the present plane to a zone that just escapes our view: evasion is the nature of this confrontation. Kovalcikova paints a light that you can hear. Fragmentation of micro universes enlarged to expose those happenstance narrative vulnerabilities that are but dreamspeck projection-shards of our own.

The sun, whorish in her appetites, will one day puke the undigested remnants of her eaten twin. Then we will have to learn how to see with all those new flecks of unrefracted light.

Words by Travis Jeppesen