A man walks steadily down the middle of a street. His white beard and simple clothing could be from recent times or millennia ago. The houses on either side of the street feel more contemporary and could be from a European town. Yet this is where the normality ends as a donkey stands atop one of the houses and a lion seems to be desperately reaching up to try and grab it, while a giant eye watches this all unfold from the end of the street – only half of it visible as if it were the rising sun.
There’s a lot of symbolism to interpret in the paintings of Olga Puzikova, and each of her works bears her trademark style of having words written around their borders. In this work,‘Enigmatic City’, the text reads “be steadfast and valorous, fear not, nor be thou dismayed, for thou art not alone”. Is this reassurance for the man in the centre of the work as he is shadowed by a snake? Is it for the lion to continue its pursuit of the donkey, though it remains out of reach?
The mysteries abound in the work, including how it appears to be daytime even though stars are visible. It reminds me of René Magritte’s ‘Empire of Light’ where the subjects in the painting suggest it’s nighttime, but the sky is blue with fluffy clouds. It’s this mixture of the surreal and the everyday that creates unsettling, fantastical scenes.
A simple scene of a man fishing feels bucolic, but in the background, another man appears to be worshipping a giant eye in the sky. A commuter rushes to work, coffee in hand and glancing at his phone, unaware of the cherubs flying next to him. While each work is accompanied by text that could be read as biblical in style, such as ‘for all things under heaven serve those who seek the light’, they aren’t directly linked to any religious or spiritual text. The artist prefers not to explain each piece, much like the famous Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, who liked her works to retain their ‘radical ambiguity’.
The recurring motif of the eye evokes Salvador Dalí’s practice, in which he used eyes as a symbol of the unconscious, disembodied gaze that is always watching. Is it an eye that watches over and protects, is it judging, or is it representative of a more powerful entity?
Much like many Surrealists, Puzikova creates dream-like visions in which characters and animals from different scenarios come together to create scenes that couldn’t exist in the real world, even as they reference it.
As her work develops, I’d like to see more symbolism in each piece, possibly referencing the long line of female surrealists who came before her, including Tanning, Leonor Fini, and Frida Kahlo. The works may even evolve into multiple series that tell a narrative from one painting to the next.
We could spend endless hours interpreting our dreams and draw multiple conclusions from them. Olga Puzikova asks us to enter her worlds, decide what we want to take away from them, and question what we see in them and what reflection of ourselves we can find in her paintings.
More information on Olga Puzikova’s work may be found on her Instagram.
All images are the copyright of the artist.
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