PPS:

Petra Navrátilová’s exhibition is called PPS, an abbreviation for Post Post Scriptum, i.e. the last last word. Gilded under the script, as an emphasis on something that should be delivered, but at the same time remains hanging in the air. In archaic Czech, we would call it douška, but here the words bend, lose their usual meanings, and fold into new codes. Collaged, ambiguous, unanchored.

Historically, the last word had its own weight. It was an additional message at the end of the letter, a note written in retrospect because nothing could be inserted into the rigid flow of the manuscript. Today, in the age of digital writing, when text can be endlessly corrected and rewritten, its meaning is fading. Yet, it still carries a kind of topical urgency, a gesture attached to what may have already been closed.

Petra is a restaurateur by profession. Restoration is a long-term process. It can take months or even years because there are certain technological procedures and pauses. Each intervention must be meaningful and must not damage the work. On the other hand, her free work, even though it is based on restoration, is free of these limitations. It is much faster, intuitive, and composed. Petra combines elements regardless of their original meaning, a Baroque ornament alongside a Renaissance stucco or a painting from another continent. It is not a reconstruction of the past, but a translation of it into the present.

This approach is also reflected in her exhibited works: collages divided into the sets of White Boxes and Black Boxes. They do not tell any story, they function as individual images where already transformed fragments of history have become new signs. A Baroque wooden frame, the glass trimmings of a chandelier, a Renaissance tiled stove and plaster, stucco, painted grounds and nails from paintings; things that have outlived their usefulness and have been thrown into the rubble during the reconstruction of monuments or the restoration of works of art. Petra pulls them back out and transforms them into new material. She brings them back within a new grouping, stripped of their original context.

Another distinctive layer of the collages are the cotton balls that Petra hand-tangles. In restoration practice, they are used to clean paintings, for example, those with reddish hues bear traces of bolus sealants, typical for repairing Baroque paintings with a red ground layer, while the green and blue ones are already purposely re-colored by the artist to expand their visual language.

The exhibited works thus combine restoration precision with free creative dynamics. While in restoration it is important to preserve the work as much as possible in its original form and not to introduce one’s own gestures, in collages there is nothing to protect. These are new compositions in which the past is not dissolved but transformed. And it is with this essence of The Last Last Word that I would conclude: Not to close, but to add.