Adéla Janská’s practice is a meditation on form and perception, a delicate unravelling of selfhood tracing contours of femininity with an ethereal hand. Her subjects, often female figures - unyielding and imbued with a spectral grace - exist within a liminal space where their very stillness exude a sense of mystery and enigmatic depth. With their impenetrable surfaces concealing layers of meaning beneath the fragile gleam of porcelain glass skin, these delicate effigies, drawn from her childhood memory of playing with paper dolls, or inspired by from her collection of Bohemian and Bavarian figurines, serve as symbols - untouchable, eternal, their surfaces unmarked by time or physicality.
Janská’s fascination with dolls did not begin with the porcelain figurines she collects today. As a child, she loved to play with paper dolls. Fragile, interchangeable, cut from magazines, their flat bodies could slip into different outfits, shifting identities at will. They were vessels for imagined lives, controlled and arranged at her fingertips. But what seemed a game then, an exercise in transformation, takes now on a more mature dimension in her practice. The paper dolls of her childhood return in her mind now as spectres of womanhood—figures both adorned and constrained, dressed up and stripped down, assigned roles as easily as they were discarded. They recall the weightlessness of childhood imagery, and yet they bear the gravity of a woman’s lived experience.
“The clash of my perception of paper dolls as a child and now at my age,” Janská reflects, “is the realization that they were not just playthings, but symbols of the way women are shaped, posed, expected to fit predetermined roles. Their beauty is effortless, unburdened, but also eerily passive. And in that, I recognize the tension in my own work.”
This tension between fluidity and confinement permeates her paintings and resonates in the meaning of the Paris solo exhibition title “Collisions”. The women she renders are like those childhood cutouts, their surfaces smooth, their expressions frozen. Yet they are not merely passive dolls; they are guardians of their own unknowability. They exist beyond the gaze, beyond touch, their impenetrability not a flaw, but a form of quiet resistance.
Janská’s use of dollhouse backdrops further deepens this meditation on containment and transformation. The home, once a space of comfort and belonging, now becomes a stage—a carefully constructed microcosm where identity is both performed and enclosed. The portraits framed by these intimate yet distant settings, hover between nostalgia and estrangement. The lightness of childhood games has given way to the weight of introspection. The weightlessness of her figures is not merely aesthetic but existential, echoing Milan Kundera’s lightness of being, the paradox of lightness and weight, of whether life is defined by meaning or is liberated by the absence of it. The paintings grapple with the transient, the unattainable, the delicacy of their character reveal with a hyperrealistic ingenuity that they are unburdened by time, yet they evoke the inexorable passage of life. To glance upon her figures is to confront one’s own perceptions of womanhood, of time, of self. Are they still playing a game, or have they, at last, stepped beyond it?
Through the lens of phenomenology, particularly drawn from the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the artist explores the threshold between subject and object, between perception and reality. Her work emphasises that perception is not a passive reception of the world but an active engagement with it—an ongoing dialogue between the self and its surroundings, and challenges the viewer to reconsider the act of looking - to question whether what is seen is truly perceived, or if meaning is merely a reflection of our own transient gaze. In this tension, Adéla Janská’s paintings become acts of discovery rather than statements.
Exhibition text by Luana Hildebrandt
