Adam Líška↓

About the work

Ground Floor

The title of Adam Líška’s diploma project is a picture of his unfulfilled desire to live on a higher floor. It accompanies him throughout most of his life. Whether with his family, someone else, or alone, he has always stayed on the ground floor. This fact complements a certain depression which the artist feels and accepts as his intrinsic part and works with. The gloominess is also a constituent of his flow of thoughts projected through the reality he redraws.

The ground floor is as bothersome for Líška as the thoughts he needs to let out and dissolve. He never stops drawing from and solving this problem. It brings a feeling of liberation which he would never achieve without these negative factors. He then tries to transfer the resulting harmony to his works. They are visualizations of his personal perception and the stimuli related to it. Líška pictures their legibility via real space and the objects in it. He prefers solitude in order to meditate and allow for the free flow of his thoughts. The presence of figure in his oeuvre is therefore secondary.

Líška realizes his works in several stages. The first is the elaboration of a view, an effort to be consistent in what he currently perceives. This encourages him to draw or paint material space and its objects for one or two days; here, the artist progresses fast to seize the moment as clearly as possible. He mainly employs ink washing, paint, but also pencil or pencil finishing. In the next stage, he scans the drawing, prints it and transfers it with the help of a solvent onto a new format. The alchemage technique suits him, since the final hazy print asks for re-intervention, additional drawing – of lights, shadows, outlines. In this stage, Líška proceeds more slowly: the print requires lengthy – slow and focused – hatching and dotting. In the process, the solvent creates maps and empty spots offering space for a drawing finish. It at the same time covers the paper with a fine filter, which visually unifies the various views into the spaces, helps unify the format, and removes the chaos of contrasts. Líška therefore views alchemage as a technique that adds harmony to his artistic projection.