In the same year, Kristína Bukovčáková’s paintings also began to settle both thematically and formally around compositions of plants, soil, stones, flowers and fruit. The change in her painting approach, i.e. the transition from classical painting to the airbrush technique, paradoxically brought a visual and thematic heaviness to Kristína. Her originally figurative paintings full of air have become thickened with the structures of tree bark, roots, layers of soil, fruit peels or pansy flowers, reminiscent of martial ritual masks. But is it possible, in a time increasingly struggling with the consequences of climate change, to paint images full of natural elements and maintain a purely positive, celebratory or romantic attitude towards nature? Certainly not for Kristína – in her paintings, from the very beginning, fruit rots, plant offshoots struggle gruellingly to survive, drops of water seem to be the last to wet the flowers of carnivores for a long time, and pests nibble leaves into anthropomorphic shapes. It is probably symptomatic that the various moulds, rots and pests in the garden, fabricated with the help of pomology books, gardening manuals and atlases, were the imaginary heroes of her paintings at the height of the covid pandemic.

The most sensitive indicator of changes in the delicate balance of the biosphere are insects, whose decline may be one of the last warnings to humanity in the near future. As a result of warmer temperatures, plants and trees are flowering earlier and are thus not in the necessary symbiosis with the time when butterflies lay their eggs and metamorphose. The flowers have no one to pollinate them and the butterflies lose their natural food – the flora they depend on has already bloomed. They must therefore feed on the flowers of alternative plants, which affects their following survival and even their reproduction. A vicious circle is being created, where butterfly and flower species are declining due to human influence, and humanity itself is endangering its future. Thanks to this direct experience with the fragility of biodiversity, Kristína frames her painted microdramas in the shapes of butterfly wings, on the flapping of which the entire biotope, or rather all life on Earth, is proverbially dependent. The paintings, which are paradoxically so compelling for their toxic-stain colours, are populated by butterfly chrysalises – symbols of forced shelter from the world, but also of resilient, changeable and adaptable hope.