Comuzzi, Eva: Tales and Poems 2010

The rain before it falls by Jonathan Coe was the first reference that came to my mind when I got to know the work of Petra Feriancova. A melancholic and delicate novel in which the protagonist, Rosamund, having arrived to the end of her life, registers a testament that meticulously describes twenty pictures to a blind girl. Twenty slides of a suffered life, to give a past to someone who has never had it, to give a form to something that she doesn’t know, and that she has never had a chance to see. The image of the first rain to fall, just like the feelings, the memories, the sensations, is something  impalpable, undescribable, something magic. The rain is water, the element that continually changes its shape and state and as such is very similar to a story. It is never the same, but always in movement. What I see and what I tell , what I describe and what I write. Everything is always deceptive. Even the pictures carry this characteristic with themselves: “ Beatrix seems to be very happy here, everybody seems so, to tell the truth” affirms Rosamund, “ I know that in the pictures everybody smiles all the time, and for this we should never trust in what they portray. “ Me, for example, own very few pictures of the nicest or most important moments, because to photograph them would imply distraction either mine or of persons that share them with me. And therefore I describe them. Not at the given moment, but after some time. It is probably in a different way from that how they happened…

I often happen to think how individuals that are around me, perceive the same information, and how they observe the landscape, and how they interpret behavior of a person, and how they see their own face. In I Asked My Friends To Describe An Artwork To Me, realized between 2007 and 2009, Feriancova semms to ask herself these questions, and decides so not to go to the exhibitions anymore, to send her friends and to let them tell about them to her. The result is a collection of printed texts on a newspaper paper that functions as a diary, and that converse with the spectator, producing different imaginative processes.

To tell and to share are a constant of the poetic of the author, who in her works puts in dialogue the present and the past, the personal and the collective story, landscapes and spaces. The interiors of the photographs at the exhibition, however they are empty and apparently mute, are full of a secret life of their inhabitants. They are places associated with home, intimity, and rest. They depict tables or in fact furniture in which we rest to talk or write and they describe the relationships that are established among people, the communication, the relationships (often difficult) and as a consequence the language. The language that changes not only according to the tone and timbre, of the usage to which it is destined, but also according to epochs. With time, in fact, the words are lost, and change their meaning, some are added and some are taken away, just like with a sculptor in realizing his work. And the work of Feriancova is such, it is a sculpture of words told, or only imagined where everything is intertwined. So she has told me about her works in e-mails that we have interchanged. I haven’t yet seen the installation, but I am maybe able to conceive of it already. And it will be different from what I expected.