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Imagine a wild garden – free from the constraints of geometric design where vitality reigns
unchecked. Exuberant. A place where insects, together with all other organisms and
animals, return and find their rightful place and balance. The concept of uncultivated
garden embodies the essence, as a place of the wild, the genuine, the authentic, but
mostly, the unknown.
Garden is the archetypal space of rest and tranquillity, with a flavour of certain
secretiveness or hiddeness. It becomes a superstructure of the political, social or official
sphere. Through yet another lens, garden fascinate us – it has a hidden strange time,
constantly ongoing, almost unstructured. In this temporality, the lines between human
and non-human are vanished. Delving deeper into perception, one can hear that strange
silence that is not silence at all ... All seems to have its own time, its own duty – one
temporality occurs on the surface, another deep within.
In the world today, the temporality of the body of Earth has become a pressing issue, by
no coincidence capturing the attention of many contemporary thinkers. Planetary time
represents the time of the Earth, of minerals, caves, underground water or rocks. Still,
something artificial infiltrates this body – the presence of plastiglomerates. A new type of
rock where the particles of molten plastic and natural minerals fuse into one, has prompted
a community of artists to imagine the future. The artistic world turns its eyes to it, as the
issue is no longer marginal.
CrocodilePOWER focuses on the same place, reinterpreting mythological narratives,
combining them with contemporary imagination. It is far from any coincidence that the
paintings and sculptures presented at the show also invite us into peculiar gardens that
hang in surreal timelessness. Yet, this dreamlike feature is different – contaminated by
something essentially artificial, just like the rock mentioned above. They thus create new
fluid worlds that combine the past, present and future, the natural with the artificial, the
living with the lifeless, the human with the non-human.
Text by Erik Vilim
Steinhauser gallery, Bratislava