'I was keeping it all safe for you' by Jaroslav Kyša at Zahorian & Van Espen, Bratislava

Dead skin subject to gravity; fossil armament of a soldier as a remnant of war conflict; abandoned bee combs without their companies and infected by a pest; 'condensation' of automobile waste artificially created stalactites that have grown under highway bridges. In the space of the Zahorian & Van Espen gallery, all of this is immersed in an unusual atmosphere that is strange to us at first sight, but at the same time, it presents something very familiar to us. The presence of man as a geomorphologic actor is palpable here and yet we cannot point at it. It is hidden behind all this evidence of the past. Behind objects whose inner qualities retain traces of advanced time. In general, the state of decomposition, composition and growth of fossils and sediments is a memory: the memory whereby geologists and palaeontologists reconstruct the time before the emergence of mankind when the expansionism of our thinking was not even in the seeds. As a result of these material records of the past, science can deduce exact images of ancient times with their geological changes and ecosystems. The time of this history without man seems somewhat different to us today, its slowness is radically distant, beyond our imagination. Although the presented environment of Jaroslav Kyša (1981) with an untitled work (detection field) (2018) by Radovan Čerevka (1980) evokes the past, his passage of time is different. Standing in this space, we suspect on the layers of stalactites or falling skin from the ceiling a strange pace of duration, which, however, occurs after exhaustion - is actually a slowdown. The space of the Zahorian & Van Espen Gallery has thus become a deposit of the past, which is anchored in the future. It is the archaeology of tomorrow's vision in which we can more intensively observe the impact of man.

— Erik Vilim