LUCIA PAPČOVÁ

The utopian concept of Arcadia – a perfect land, or landscape, where beauty, wilderness and sublime are perfectly balanced. Being a world outside this world, therefore unknown and infinite. This place is “somewhere” and we could perhaps find it one day. Yet we are aware that it is a world behind the canvas – world of our abstract concepts, not of the real world, where always something imperfect is destroying the potential Arcadias we find ourselves in.

The Arcadia project is my answer to this concept of world behind the canvas.  I spent a significant amount of time in the landscape, observing how the changes of light throughout the day affect the perception of space. Some of the light situations appear only on one or a few specific days during the year, what sometimes requires me to return and be in situ the following year.  Avoiding digital manipulation and using the classical black-and-white photography process allows me to reach a certain level of objectivity.

Objective reality is the answer to utopian Arcadia. What I find as a possible connection between the two is the infinitude of a distant space, which exists possibly somewhere. I have been in Arcadia – I was there, but that wasn't the Arcadia yet, the moment I captured was only the material for the the print, where it comes to life as unending frozen moment of time, somewhere in a distanced space, which surfaces, but never appears fully. The reference to the real space and time is important, but the image is already detached from it, creating an abstraction to relate to – still made of this world and therefore possibly making Arcadia more convincing.