Signs and Miracles

Cora Piantoni (born 1975 in Munich, lives and works in Munich and Zürich) is reminiscent of a certain artistic tendency reflection, represented in our country in the 1970´s for instance by Karel Miler, later by Martin Zet and in the 21st century by Barbora Klímová, Eva Koťátková or Eva Jiřička and others. It is a pity that the series “Edge Conditions” in which the author interconnects the language of the architecture with narration and body expressiveness is presented with a delay, at this time when works on a similar topic have already gone through their intense Renaissance. The Entrance Gallery thus presents the cycle “Edge Conditions” as an illustration of a parallel which is very close to the Czech artistic work. In this series Piantoni tries to link her personage with the architecture built especially for cultural and social purposes and watches what feedback design provides to a human body since it arises from its needs and measures. The overall geometric and lexicographic nature of the series retreats her expression further from performance art and favours photography and situations where the body is presented as on object that is a part of an architectural complex.
In another example Cora Piantoni presents us with a lapidary reaction to the self-presentation of a period from the Czech history, a mythical picture of a dissident – a heater. In a reconstruction series “The Heaters” she handles the topics of her arrangements in a mechanic way thanks to which she keeps a sensory distance from the elaborated topic and frees it from its psychological and conceptual burden. She complements her pictorial schematism with individual definitions of the word dissident from each protagonist. She does not consider essential whether the personalities portrayed actually were heaters or dissidents, her ambition is not to try to present a final and true picture, but she wants to open the door for possible redefinitions of the notoriously famous term. A cold reflection of the Czech past in a reality perceived from the outside speaks about our restricted ability of self-presentations beyond the boundaries of the “Czech” sensibility. Piantoni, as somebody coming from the outside, presents our past without any piety through the experience of an extraneous independent observer and simplifies her basic picture into an only pictograph. She puts an equal sign between the words dissident and heater. Naturally, many of us are not going to be willing to accept that. She deals with the most basic terms of the reality that are, in their generality, very hard to define. This topical and semantic reduction of our past that the author dares to execute instead of us, in many cases does not evoke satisfaction, but has a tendency to provoke. Rather than to an iconic picture caught on the photograph she directs our attention to the abyss-like space that stretches between her depleted and our oversaturated interpretation.

Edith Jeřábková