In 2004, the sky fell on the Tatra forest. It literally fell because the type of wind that the forest

blew the forest down like a match is called a downwind or gravity wind. The sky is not static.

In fact, it is constantly flowing, like a river, which then, in a single moment, in a single wave, poured out

on the Tatras. The Tatra forest stood no chance against that mass of falling sky. Within a short moment it lay almost entirely on the ground, covered with everything that overhung it, covered with the whole sky... All of us have had the experience of being swamped by something that infinitely beyond us. Helena Tóth's new paintings inspired by the Tatras give us an interesting answer to the question of how to cope with such an experience.

 

... and long live the red spruce!

 

When I look at Helena Tóth's new paintings, I think of the Tatra calamity of

2004, when almost the entire Tatra forest disappeared overnight. Otherwise, have you noticed that since the Tatra calamity we no longer associate the word "calamity" only with the plough? With a plough clearing away piles of snow, but also with lorries full of felled timber? 

 

Calamity for us has no longer ceased to be an event in which we are faced with what is immensely beyond us, and what we cannot control. Instead, we use the word to refer to the technical coping, dealing with the consequences of such events.

However, in the days before 'trucks and snow ploughs', the word calamitas referred to the enormous catastrophe, or a great misfortune. It meant, in short, a vertical, humanly infinite

transcending event. Today we understand the word calamity horizontally, it is for us only one

one of many, everyday events. But that is only until the calamity reaches our own lives. 

 

There, suddenly disaster and misfortune are no longer just one of many events, but the very event that has touched us in a profound way. It is we who are here suddenly confronted with something that transcends us enormously, and so we can experience again for ourselves

the original verticality of life and its most inherent mystery.

 

But it is not easy to stand such an experience. For our culture and society are increasingly

to a horizontality that forces us to "come to terms" with that which transcends us. In the most horizontal sense! We say "deal with it", but what we really mean is "deal with it" in the sense of "sort it out", "tidy it up", "put it right"...

 

It directs us to strip personal disasters and misfortunes of their verticality, to

to strip them of that which transcends us, to reduce them (humiliate?) to something bearable, something we can better handle, or even control. As if to cope with a personal misfortune or catastrophe is only possible if we magnify them as thoroughly as possible. Helen's Tatra images also show us the example of the red spruce (the only tree that after the Tatra calamity left standing) remind us that with great, and even personal, misfortune, we can indeed cope only when we remain steadily facing the verticality of this misfortune, when we do not let anyone or anything deprive us of the gift of this infinitely transcending verticality.

 

In adversity we grow. Just as the trees in Helen's paintings grow.

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Exhibition: Ode to the conifers

Author: Helen Tóth

Curator: Peter Mačaj

Duration: from 18th March, 23 to 7th May, 23

Photos by: Jana Budaiova

Where: Blu : gallery, Modra, Slovakia

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