Vojtěch Kovařík in conversation with Aristide Maillol and Henri Rousseau → SOULSCAPE

For his new exhibition at Galerie Derouillon, Vojtěch Kovařík unveils a new body of work in conversation with Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) and Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). The exhibition will be accompanied by a text by Nicolas-Xavier Ferrand What remains of a myth once its story has been stripped away? With "SOULSCAPE", Kovařík removes all narrative from his figures, turning them into bearers of inner states: doubt, silence, tension, fragility. Adonis without his triumphant beauty, Narcissus refusing his own reflection, Dionysus holding his mask at arm's length, in that precise moment when one's image of oneself begins to waver. His figures, isolated within intimate settings, echo the reserved compositions of Rousseau. As in _Le Moulin_, presented in the exhibition, the flat areas of colour and frank palettes establish a suspended atmosphere, calm and slightly removed from the world. A figure carrying a sheaf of wheat invokes the iconography of Socialist Realism — Kovařík introduces a crack, revealing what the heroic ideal conceals. A displacement Maillol had already enacted: in _Le Monument aux morts_ _de Port-Vendres_, massive bodies and classical monumentality yield to doubt rather than power, the triumphant hero giving way to a figure more restrained and fragile. "SOULSCAPE" is the name Kovařík gives to this territory: an inner landscape, neither entirely legible nor entirely obscure. In his own words: _"an open space in which the viewer may encounter something that is not entirely definable, yet deeply personal…_"