búw at the Švestka Gallery

b/w at the Svestka Gallery

The „Black and White“ installation by the italian artist Eugenio Percossi (1974) is an entry ticket to a world, where reality fades into illusion, and truth into dreaming imagination. The black and white room with the period atmosphere and the faithful scenery from the Thirties is so authentic, that you have the impression, that it has always been there. Everything, from the furniture, the floor, the roll decoration on the walls, the beds, to the accessories, and even the flowers are grey, as if old and forgotten. Stiff, frozen, dreaming. Percossi used in full the contrast of the black and white room, that you can look at from the outside, with the world of colours brought in by the amazed observers. He used them as means of expression of the two close-knit antipoles of life and death.

As the black and white in the monad, even here the contrasts are prerequisite for a compatibility and conditionality of one’s own existence. Percossi’s room is empty, but full and furnished to every detail, in the bedroom’s twilight small toiletries shine, as if someone left them here a short while ago. In the living room one can seat in two period armchairs clearly worn off from the use. The grayish shade of the whole interiors, furniture and accessories, has an effect of unreality and illusion blending with the atmosphere of nostalgia and memories. Virginia Woolf called for her own room, which was to her the expression of a woman’s freedom. Percossi’s room is closer to the archetyp of collective unconsciousness, with whom the author so likes to work.

(NIKOLA BUKAJOVÁ)