Ivana Lomová’s paintings are such moments stopped in time. Her realistic technique neither dramatizes the world in any way, nor does it endow it with excess romanticism and sentimentality. They reflect the reality of a common observer, often with a slightly ironic commentary or a feeling of gratitude, and sometimes with a rather cold detachment. They consist of compositions of our own perspectives as Ivana Lomová sees what we see, though it may be in some other time and elsewhere. In spite of that, the feeling of intimate familiarity is always present.

And when the painter is looking, so are we. We are looking at scenes of travellers on a train, we are looking at streets of Prague, we are looking from windows of apartment houses together with the author’s protagonists, we are looking at couples in intimate environment... And not only do we feel that the time has stopped, but we sense something that we know so well. Our very own experience of a long journey on a train mingles with the experience depicted in the painting, and is transformed into a kind of generally valid experience, into a symbolic scene. We cannot differentiate anymore whether it is the painter or us on the train; the slumbering passengers on the backdrop of the motion-blurred countryside in the window have become a symbol for a journey as such. We do not know if it was us who stood at the window, or a father of the painter – the window turns into an intersection of the experiences that we have lived through, a symbol of view extension, and also a symbol of lonesomeness, focus and faint melancholy.

Regional Art Gallery in Liberec