Existence without the Existing

Ivona Raimanová

I enjoy paintings by Ivana Lomová, I like to look at them. They have silence and emptiness in them. I peek into abandoned spaces where people left only empty chairs or deserted streets behind. I stare at facades of houses, and windows in them seem to be lifeless. Sometimes, there is a figure in the picture (mostly with their back turned to us), standing in complete silence, motionless, dwelling in timelessness. 

Views of city streets, cafés, offices, means of transport or intimate quarters of people – these are Lomová’s images of the world that we know from our everyday lives. Something is different in them, though. In his essay on understanding, Miroslav Petříček wrote: “We could imagine for example a boulevard in a large city: it is a summer’s Sunday, and since the street is away from the centre, it is unpeopled. And sharp midday sun burns down on this strange canyon, its rays reflecting from the white walls, falling on the paving, and glowing upwards from there.” Then he continues: “The painting is meaningful to me. Emptiness, dead silence and torridness that it suggests are not meaningless – they have a message to tell, they want to suggest something. This painting says something but it is something different to what I see directly; I understand int only because I can read it as a metaphor.” 

Of what are Ivana Lomová’s paintings a metaphor? “I am fascinated by time. Time is a miracle. I want to stop it in my paintings. I am ravished by my memories of my childhood. I am so sorry that it will never repeat. And this is what my paintings of Prague are about, too,” the author said about her paintings of city streets. And then she continued: “I want to stop time and remain lonely and remote. This is where I feel solidness, where I see something that I can hold on to. Paintings stop time, and I guess this is one of the main purposes of art.” Emptiness and void may evoke fear in some people, or bring a feeling of regaining personal security to others. For Lomová, it is the latter. 

First of all, the painting style of Ivana Lomová overwhelms you with its nearly obsessively meticulous description of phenomena in the sense of “what I see is what I see”. However, her photographically accurate depiction of the exteriority of the given reality has a different purpose: to encrypt the message. Lomová does not want to merely inform us of how buildings or city streets appear to the naked eye; through artistic paintings, the painter “takes (the given, understood) items out from the world, thus disrupting their connection to a subject.” Metaphor is what speaks to us from Lomová’s canvasses, and in order to understand it, one does not require „to have the knowledge from the system of mechanisms or mechanically explicable things… names are not important here as understanding does not wish to know, it even does not wish to discover.“ 

The encounter of a definite verismo and unspecific being that is concealed by the mimetically faithful description is the crucial moment in Ivana Lomová’s work. This exact moment transforms her paintings into enigmatic scenes that we struggle to understand. Buildings, streets, windows are removed from the world of empirical exteriority and of things given. They float in the silence and emptiness of eternal timelessness, having no relation whatsoever to actual time and space. We feel “presence of some existence that does not pertain to the zone of The Same, presence that extends beyond this zone and confirms its “status” of infinity.”

With her masterful portrayal of emptiness (that is full, though), Ivana Lomová very much gives us the feeling of seeing “an un-obvious phenomenon” that somehow exists outside the beingness of the world. This is the phenomenon that Emmanuel Lévinas calls “il y a” (“it is”). The philosopher says: “I understand the “it is” as a phenomenon of an impersonal being, as “it”. When pondering about this topic, I derive from my childhood memories. A child falls asleep alone, while its parents live on; the child has a feeling that the silence in its room is humming. The sensation is similar to taking an empty shell in hands and putting it to your ear: the silence in it seems to be full, as if it resonated through it. A very similar feeling we get when we realise that even when there is nothing, we cannot deny the fact that “it is”.” 

What we see is what we do not see. This is the source of mysteriousness of Lomová’s events in pictures. This emptiness and desolation that cannot be defined suggest a notion of being in touch with “existence without the existing”, seeing something that is happening “beyond” the world of phenomena. It is something that “has no place in the order of knowledge”.  I do not know what is it that I am encountering, I have no idea what “it” looks like. But I do understand. “The understanding does not know, yet it does understand.” Not knowing is a great gift of life. This is why I like Ivana Lomová’s paintings so much.

Literature:

Petříček, M., Němý obraz čili rozumění. In: Petříček, M., Znaky každodennosti čili krátké řeči téměř o ničem. Herrmann a synové, Praha 1993.

Lévinas, E., Existence a ten, kdo existuje, Oikoymenh, Praha 1997.

Lévinas, E., Etika a nekončeno. Oikoymenh, Praha 1994.

Petr Vaškovič, K Lévinasově pojmu „il y a“, aneb cesta od hrůzy k etice. Filosofický časopis, Filosofický ústav AV ČR, Praha 2020/6.

© 2024 Ivona Raimanová