Purple Magazine
— The Magic Issue #42 F/W 2024
adéla janská
Adéla Janská, untitled, 2024, oil on panel
Adéla Janská, the yellow portrait, 2024, oil on canvas board, 12 1/4 x 9 7/8 inches
Adéla Janská, medallion, 2023, oil and acrylic spray on canvas, 82 5/8 x 55 1/8 inches
Adéla Janská’s studio. pink boudoir, 2024, oil and oil stick on canvas, 70 7/8 x 59 inches
Adéla Janská, red room ii, 2024, oil and oil stick on canvas, 47 1/4 x 37 3/8 inches
Adéla Janská, pixel portrait, 2023, oil and acrylic spray on canvas, 59 x 43 1/4 inches
interview
by BILL POWERS
portraits by HANA KNÍZOVÁ
art direction by OLIVIA DROZDZ
Czech artist Adéla Janská primarily paints female nudes and faces, employing porcelain dolls as models. She delves into their surface to render ethereal, impenetrable, and sensual representations of women, portraying them as modern naiads and nymphs.
BILL POWERS — A few months ago, the New Yorker journalist Naomi Fry declared 2023 “The Year of the Doll,” citing cultural flashpoints like Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla Presley biopic and Emma Cline’s novel The Guest. What is your take on the porcelain subjects you depict and the dollhouses they often seem to inhabit?
ADÉLA JANSKÁ — There is a great tradition of porcelain factories in the Czech Republic, and I started collecting figures from Bavarian and Bohemian factories like Ditmar-Urbach, Horní Slavkov, and others. I was attracted by the figures’ elegance, absence of physicality, and a certain unattainability. We can characterize them in many ways: they are impenetrable, lifeless, constant, hard, and fragile at the same time. In the whiteness of their reflections, they are almost ethereal — I would say “pure.” They are like a semblance or a symbol. All these characteristics can be attributed to a woman. That’s why they became the subject of my paintings. For the Doll House series of paintings, which I made last year, I placed my porcelain figures against dollhouses to create a backdrop and a metaphor of scale. The house is an inner space; the threshold of the house is an interface between the outer and inner worlds.
BILL POWERS — Are you influenced by the literary genre of magic realism? Your fellow Czech, Milan Kundera, explored this genre in novel form.
ADÉLA JANSKÁ — I love reading and having a literary connection. My favorite author is the phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Kundera is an international name, and his books are fascinating. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was especially important for me. The Czech Republic also had many interesting female artists who were into magical realism. I admire Vlasta Vostrebalová-Fischerová, a painter and one of the first female artists to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Recently there was a big retrospective of the painter Vera Jicínská. Although she has been regarded as Cubist or Neoclassicist, her paintings are magical to me.
BILL POWERS — I know you frequently paint through the lens of phenomenology. How does that manifest in your work?
ADÉLA JANSKÁ — I cannot say I have a comprehensive conception of it. Sometimes, the form appears in the process, through the repetition and concentration on the chosen image. Painting is, for me, a spontaneous act, a movement presented by a picture that has no rigid contours; it is created from the depth, a moving abstraction. This abstraction is very real, but it has no contours. It is restricted by neither the form nor the magnitude. It is an act; it is time.
BILL POWERS — Animism feels like an extension of that fascination with phenomena — the intuitive sense that things in nature are imbued with a soul.
ADÉLA JANSKÁ — Yes, it is a dialogue through an individual and the world. This dialogue is unique to one’s perception. I sympathize with Carl Jung’s thoughts that animism is an essential source of wisdom and an inspiration for the individual and the collective unconscious.
BILL POWERS — Your figures are mostly, if not always, nude. What is that choice about?
ADÉLA JANSKÁ — For me, the naked body is a form, a being. Maybe it comes from my classic education, when we studied nudes as an essential part of an academic art education. I’m not trying to point out physicality; on the contrary, I’m denying it. An important role is played by the pose, expression, eyes, porcelain, mask, attribute, etc. Each nude has her own story, a different psyche and character. In general, I work with a woman’s identity and my own experience of being a woman. This is essential. The form itself appears in time.
BILL POWERS — You taught high-school art classes for 15 years. What did you learn from that experience?
ADÉLA JANSKÁ — I became aware of my relationship to painting because, as a teacher, you have an inner duty to mediate this outstanding relationship.
BILL POWERS — Has your relationship to sexuality in painting changed over the years? I notice younger artists sometimes feel the need to provoke viewers with shock value or the explicit.
ADÉLA JANSKÁ — I never had the need to shock or be explicit. Previously, I was interested in creating tension in the image in the form of eroticism, which in its essence is not real. The porcelain woman is unattainable in the end.
BILL POWERS — You could say all art is magic in that we put our faith in oil, acrylic, and charcoal to reveal something deeper about the human condition.
ADÉLA JANSKÁ — Painting is mysterious. An artist is an accelerator who gives general activities and phenomena that are present in the world a form at a given time. So, my view has changed from fascination to identification, and it is rather abstract. What’s important is not the names, but rather the contact. You must arrange this contact intentionally, unconscious of the presence in front of the picture and your view. All is static, and the move acts only covertly. I am also a viewer of my own paintings. The painting is, for me, a way of life and of discovering how to think. Of course, I look at contemporary paintings with interest, but I am separated from any influence or at least from conscious ones. Conversely, I am willing to have no pre-image of my future pictures.
BILL POWERS — Which artist is most magical to you, and why?
ADÉLA JANSKÁ — I find it very interesting to see how forgotten female artists from the Czech interwar scene of the 1920s and ’30s reappear in work where women play the dominant role. These are very powerful life stories, and through them we can better understand their position in this period, what they experienced, and how they approached art. One example is Milada Marešová, who belonged to the first generation of Czech female artists to achieve a formal art education.
BILL POWERS — Have you encountered moments of true magic in your life? I remember visiting the shifting sands in Africa. A mound of black volcanic ash was being blown across the plains like a mountain, and the Maasai would even leave offerings to it in homage.
ADÉLA JANSKÁ — My first thought is about my strongest childhood experience. I was about six, and suddenly I realized that I was standing on the ground and could feel the motion of the Earth. I could feel this rotation from the center of my body. Also, I never had a doll or a dollhouse, so maybe that was an inner fantasy. My sister and her friend made a doll out of me. That was not magical but rather tragic.
BILL POWERS — What is your relationship to Czech myths or mythology in general?
ADÉLA JANSKÁ — My first real and profound experience with Slavic mythology took place in 2020, when I was invited to participate in the group exhibition that the artist Mora Zmora organized with the Dom Twórczy Kadenówka Foundation, founded by the artist Paulina Ołowska. The connection between the ancient past and the present through Slavic goddesses was absolutely fascinating. In the setting of the Polish countryside, in a villa from 30 years ago that represents regional wooden architecture, it is hard to avoid the captivating atmosphere that is absolute and omnipresent. A powerful moment was the opening, when a small group of artists welcomed spring with an ancient ceremony called “The Bringing Forth of Death.” It was especially evocative for me, as someone who has lived her whole life in an urban environment. Through art, we were able to make a deep connection with mythology and folklore, and to bring these female deities to life. Back then, I decided to process and explore the Slavic myth of Rusalka, a female water demon. Rusalka appears mainly in Slavic folk literature and mythology. She has long hair and lives close to the water. Her hair represents supernatural powers, and I really liked the idea because it’s connected to the magical power of a young woman. The cycle for the Mora Zmora exhibition consisted of five paintings — porcelain rusalkas, mostly cloaked, posing in the landscape. They were positioned according to two different attributes. The first were demonic, dangerous temptresses: tradition says that in the spring and early summer, they come out of their winter caves and return to the meadows, dancing and luring young men in order to drag them under the surface forever. And the second were worthy fairies, called upon to ensure the flowering and growth of grain in the early spring.
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