In his famous essay Inside the White Cube, a key critical art theory text, Brian O’Doherty writes about the enormous sanctifying power of the Museum of Art, the most conventional format of which became the “white cube” in the twentieth century. It’s a kind of miraculous platform, an alchemical magic box, in which things transfigure and become more aesthetically pleasing and viewers more receptive. A kind of crystallization of things and senses.

The charm of the white cube and its politics have been repeatedly questioned. ‘Institutional criticism’ has ridiculed the museum’s transformative power as a “machine of vision” many times, classifying itself as the subject of art. Although mainstream art production has in the meantime gone in a different direction, some art still works and functions (!) in the white cube framework, and Denisa Lehocká’s work definitely belongs in this category.

Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to perceive and essentially trust the three artifacts precisely configured in the large room, and appreciate their qualities. Air and its vibration between objects. The relation between vertical and horizontal, suspended and laid; structural, shape and material diversity autonomous objects forming a spatial collage. Otherwise, we would not get closer to the central object of Denisa’s composition or perceive its perverse, even “abject” grandeur, all its morphological and material tensions: its cerebral power and testicularity, softness and strength, complexity and hybrid “composition”; gypsum sediments and plexiglass reflections, hair netting…

If we didn’t believe in the existence of autonomous art (Art White Cube), we would be reluctantly, an agnostic passing by, confirming that art is actually a man’s hunting.