Pavol Roskovensky

MFA Painting

Between Seeing and Knowing

For me, painting often begins with an experience of the world that cannot immediately be explained. As a child in Slovakia during the Velvet Revolution, I saw a flag disappear from the town square and a new one take its place. What changed was color and proportion, but the feeling of the space, and my relation to it, changed completely. That moment has stayed with me because it revealed something I continue to believe: before language, before explanation, visual form has the power to move us.

In my practice, I approach painting as a site of perception, discovery, and presence. Rather than treating the painting as a vehicle for fixed meaning, I understand it as something found through process. Each work develops through a sequence of decisions, corrections, revisions, and risks. What remains on the surface is not simply an image, but accumulated time, attention, and thought. A painting becomes a record of human presence because it carries the trace of a body thinking and feeling through material.

I am drawn to abstraction because it resists easy translation. It allows meaning to remain open and embodied. In our current moment, when so much visual experience is immediate, digital, disposable, and detached from its making and material reality, painting offers a different kind of encounter: slower, complicated, and human. My thesis argues that this condition still matters. Painting can hold uncertainty without resolving it, and in doing so, affirm that attention itself is meaningful.