Natália Trejbalová

The work that Natália Trejbalová presents at this edition of the Cairo Prize has a poetic and enigmatic title, part in English and part in Polish. So long (farewell) takes us to a distant, ancient world, whose life forms are now faint traces, transformed by time into inorganic elements that, as they re-emerge, remind us that we live in a complex and shared ecosystem. Pokój na Ziemi, in English Peace on Earth, is the title of a science fiction novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006), author of the book Solaris, from which the famous film by Russian director Andrej Tarkovskij was adapted. Like that of other science fiction authors, from Kurt Vonnegut to Ursula Kroeber Le Guin and the Strugatsky brothers, Lem's visionary and dystopian world is the basis for many of Trejbalová's works, created using various techniques and materials: glass, wood, wax, paper, organic and inorganic elements. For this work in particular, the artist painted a sheet of polyurethane with an airbrush and then applied it to cardboard impregnated with cement, plaster and paraffin: a stratification of surfaces and images that evokes that of the Earth's subsoil. The shapes and streaks of colour are obtained by applying animal and plant elements (feathers, sponges, branches, lichens) that act as masks, in a process reminiscent of cyanotype, historically used in botany for the documentation of plants and algae.

Manuela Brevi