Denisa Ponomarevová: Call of Nature

From black-and-white drawings of variously degraded, undefined human bodies, Daniela Ponomarevová developed a confident, clear, and colorful drawing whose perfection is strikingly uncanny. The fragmented components, representing aesthetically flawless backdrops of everyday life, are created with acrylic markers and spray paint. Some of them are subtly modified, although this is not immediately apparent. The strictly controlled drawing on a flat surface creates the illusion of digital graphics such as those seen in advertisements, shops, streets, and on the internet. Pop art images are separated into individual drawings on cardboard or paperboard, produced with artistic precision and marked with the originality of each piece. From these mobile components, she then assembles into three-dimensional sets her perception of the world as a grotesque theater—one that many have ceased to take seriously. Alongside the sketches, there are also texts employing the manipulative, or if you will, motivational language of advertising. The mass-media blitzkrieg has created an impression of a distorted perfection of a beautiful world, promised to us by commercial advertisements, or worse, ideological ones in the form of political campaigns or outright propaganda.

Daniela Ponomarevová (1998) is a visual artist working with drawing, painting, creates objects, installations, and text, with an emphasis on technical precision, craftmanship, and modular structures. In her work, she develops an artist’s concept called Post-Fairground Attraction through which she explores the visual language of fairground attractions, popular culture, and the visual strategies of the advertising world. She uses recycled cardboards both as a platform for drawing and as a construction material, using a hand-dotting technique to create a precise raster grid that ironically references the airbrush aesthetic of fairground paintings. Since 2024, she has been a PhD student at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno University of Technology. In her practice, she combines a post-conceptual approach with personal experience of manual labor in a factory, along with research into the mechanisms of visual manipulation, kitsch, and spectacle.