There are moments when one seeks a space emptied of friction. A place where the world softens, where contours dissolve, where nothing insists too strongly. A white interior, almost without information. Surfaces that absorb rather than reflect. A space that feels padded, not only physically but perceptually. One enters it as one might enter a protective atmosphere: cautiously at first, then with a growing sense of release. In such an environment, the body loosens its tension. Forms become suggestive rather than fixed. One begins to project, to imagine, to drift. It is a space that promises safety not through enclosure, but through the absence of impact. And yet, within this softness, something remains unresolved. What has been removed in order for this calm to exist? What has been muted, neutralized, held at bay?

It is within this delicate threshold between protection and desired suspension that Eliška Konečná’s exhibition You Were Never Promised a Happy Life unfolds.

Konečná’s visual research engages with modernist imaginaries of the 1960s and 70s, spanning both science-fiction and domestic futurism, and pointing toward a vision of living within total, immersive environments in which space itself conditions perception and experience. In her work, such environments are not conceived as speculative utopias, but as frameworks structured by ideals of functionality, cleanliness, and safety. These qualities invite trust precisely because of their apparent neutrality, recalling the controlled atmospheres explored in THX 11381 by George Lucas. Yet beneath this surface clarity lies a more ambiguous condition: the calm these environments produce is not natural but constructed, and therefore potentially disquieting, a tension that also runs through the suspended interiors of 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. Within the artist’s installation,the elimination of risk is inseparable from the attenuation of intensity; what is designed to protect simultaneously begins to mute. Interiors become continuous, enveloping spaces in which body and environment seem to merge, echoing the soft, immersive worlds of Verner Panton or Joe Colombo. In Konečná’s work, this integration remains unresolved: safety extends beyond the physical, subtly regulating how bodies move, perceive, and relate. These spaces do not function as refuges, but as states of neutralization. Rather than staging control as an explicit force, she is interested in forms of regulation that remain almost imperceptible, quietly structuring experience from within.

Konečná’s padded environments evoke therapeutic and medical interiors, acoustic chambers, and protective architectures designed for safety, containment, and sensory regulation. These are not approached as exceptional responses to danger, but as conditions in which protection becomes the default framework of experience. Within such spaces, the elimination of risk is inseparable from the attenuation of intensity: as Konečná notes, “what is meant to protect begins to mute at the same time.” Safety here extends beyond the physical, operating as a subtle regulation of perception and affect. These environments do not function as refuges, but as zones of neutralization, “a state in which nothing strongly threatens, but nothing fully reaches you either.” What emerges is a form of stability that does not resolve tension, but gradually levels experience into a quiet flatness, where form remains in continuous transformation. What philosopher Catherine Malabou5 describes as plasticity, “the capacity to receive form and to give form”. Within this condition, Konečná approaches the possibility of physical proximity - “leaning, lying, allowing the body to enter the image” - not as comfort, but as a situation that simultaneously questions this promise of comfort.

Comfort carries its own tension. A form of “Cruel Optimism,” to borrow from theorist Lauren Berlant, in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” What is at stake here is less an idea than a feeling: a quiet inclination toward softness, toward a state in which nothing presses too strongly. In Konečná’s words, “this desire is not neutral. It is something very present and understandable, but at the same time potentially deceptive. In the moment when comfort becomes a goal in itself,” it draws us closer even as it begins to temper intensity, to soften contact, to limit the possibility of being affected. “Protection becomes the default condition, not a response to danger, but the framework within which experience takes place.” The figures seem to emerge from within the relief, caught in a suspended tension where contact never quite arrives. What appears as release, a loosening, a drifting of forms, settles instead into a surface that absorbs and delays sensation. Proximity is maintained, but never completed. Comfort becomes a condition rather than a feeling, leaving experience suspended in the interval of touch.

Contact, here, is never neutral. One might think, for instance, of 19th-century Victorian corsetry, where the body was formed through continuous, intimate compression. A system in which softness and constraint operate simultaneously to produce form. In Konečná’s work, this dynamic becomes particularly visible in her intervention on the load-bearing column, which remains solid, structural, non-negotiable, while being wrapped in soft textile rings. What is altered is not the structure itself, but the way it is experienced: “what affects the body does not change, but only the way the body experiences it.” The softness cushions contact without transforming the conditions that produce it. Only the way it is felt shifts, operating as both an attraction and a source of unease.

Within this spatial framework, the figures that populate Konečná’s reliefs unfold as relational situations rather than symbolic entities. Their gestures suggest moments of closeness, yet remain emotionally ambiguous, resisting narrative resolution. “I do not see these figures as part of a personal mythology,” she explains, “I am interested in the structure of situations in which relationships appear to be in harmony, while this state is not fully stable, or may even be only apparent.” These moments manifest through subtle shifts — “not fully recognized even by the figures themselves” — where intimacy and misalignment unfold within the same gesture.

The spatial continuity of these reliefs and their fluid, stylised bodies recalls the mural poetics of Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)8, particularly in the Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples, which he decorated with drawings of medicinal plants, human figures, and symbolic forms unfolding across the walls as a continuous, living field. In his frescoes, nature and the body are not separated: vegetal motifs, gestures, and spiritual imagery circulate together, creating an environment in which drawing becomes atmospheric, almost breathable. Konečná’s work can be situated within this lineage of mural figuration, yet it simultaneously displaces it. Where Cocteau’s continuity produces a poetic unity, her environments introduce a quieter instability, in which relationships remain partial, suspended, and never fully resolved. What emerges is not a fixed composition, but what she describes as “a kind of network,” where motifs reappear, drift, and dissolve. In the exhibition, this network condenses further, as individual images fade into a pale atmosphere of white haze and softness, situating her practice at the intersection of a post-symbolist sensitivity and a contemporary, spatial understanding of relational experience.

In You Were Never Promised a Happy Life, Konečná does not propose an escape from the conditions she describes. Rather, she constructs an environment in which they can be felt with particular clarity. A space that appears calm, soft, and protective - yet quietly asks what has been removed in order for this calm to exist. A space in which vulnerability is not eliminated, but diffused. Where the possibility of being touched physically, emotionally, perceptually, remains both present and uncertain.

Eliška Konečná’s (b. 1992, Czech Republic) practice explores softness and care as ambivalent relational conditions—where gestures of protection and support may also carry pressure, restraint, or the potential for harm. Working primarily with textile bas-reliefs, she approaches the body as a site of imprint and exposure: receptive and vulnerable, yet actively shaping its surroundings. Motifs of touch, proximity, and gentle constraint recur throughout her work, tracing moments where tenderness and control become inseparable. Konečná has recently exhibited at Kunsthaus Hamburg, the National Gallery of Prague, the City Gallery of Prague, Krupa Art Foundation in Wrocław, Nicodim Gallery in Bucharest, Public Gallery in London, eastcontemporary in Milan, Rondo Sztuki in Katowice, Karlín Studios, and Berlínskej Model in Prague. She was recently a resident at Palazzo Monti in Brescia. Her works are part of National Gallery of Prague as well as private ones.