The Sun Dog. A speculative hybrid identity, represented in the exhibition through an animated film accompanied by a voiceover, constructs a vision of climatic affectivity. It is an open body, permeated by external political, ecological, and psychological pressures. An avatar of ideological grotesque, it embodies the crisis of anthropocentric identity, displaying the iconography of right-wing populism and a toxic form of national identity on a faded baseball cap. Yet the cap is not aggressively red, as in its most notorious form – its washed-out, pink hue carries a certain subversive hope for better (?) post-worlds, or perhaps signals exhaustion with harmful inherited patterns.
The visual sequence conjures a vision of planetary empathy: climatic processes unfold directly on the face, as Pintérová radicalizes the ecological image – climate is no longer “out there,” external to the human; it is within – in facial expression, in identity itself. The animation explores the disintegration of the subject under the weight of environmental and ideological crises – the mask cannot hold its shape, cannot function as a boundary between inside and out, as a protective shield. The voiceover, composed of fragments from pop song lyrics, forms a collage of magical contemporary language, mixing pop-cultural symbols with archetypal ones, opening up a space for both personal and collective reflection.
The monster, as a feminist figure of otherness, disrupts norms and creates space for post-identitarian, environmental, and ritual thinking. In feminist psychoanalysis, monstrosity becomes a surrogate symbol of transgressing patriarchal patterns (Barbara Creed). At the same time, J. J. Cohen, whom the artist also references in the work, views the monster in his book Monster Culture (Seven Theses) as a dynamic and culturally conditioned phenomenon – one that constructs and reflects collective anxieties.
The print Cats of two cat skeletons – one dark, shiny, almost volcanic, and the other light, appearing more fragile – might, through this formal opposition, evoke conflict; yet instead of tension, the dominant feeling is one of (fragile?) balance. The slightly opened jaws of the skeletons suggest dialogue, not threat. A jewel growing like coral from the tail of one of the cats acts as a ritual detail – a link between the dead and the living, the human and the animal – a suggestion that even death can carry beauty. The quiet spirituality of the scene is complemented by a swarm of butterflies, symbols of transformation.
In her exhibition presentation, Pintérová navigates the boundaries between digital illustration, animation, and figurative soft horror. She employs technology as a contemporary shamanic tool to create fragments of a myth about the collapse of the world as we know it; a metaphorical hack of the bug of ritual phallic power – a ritual phallacy (in the sense of disrupting patriarchal power structures) – and to speculate on the archaeology of the future.
Lucia Gavulová