I always experience a sense of distance in front of Patricia Fex's paintings. But it is not the boring absence of emotional attachment that we sometimes feel in front of academic mannerisms. Rather, it is a shared position of the artist herself, with which she looks at the possibilities of the painting medium in the current situation. For me, Patricia is an essential painter, which may sound somewhat paradoxical after the above. However, it is her conscious distancing from the elemental painterly expression and her almost analytical exploration of the expressive possibilities of painting that leads me to this conclusion. Her paintings are a synthesis of a conceptual grasp of traditional painting positions with her personal background. The process of self-expression here is not confined to the narrow field of the form of the painterly gesture, but is reflected in the artist's very way of grasping the medium of painting. However, her work does not only cover the field of painting, but also a number of realizations that extend into other areas. Despite this, it is in paintings that we can find the core of her work.

The self-portrait is one of the classic genres of painting, which has often become a proclamation of its author's creative position. Depicting oneself through one's art was a clear statement of the artist's self-confidence as a creative personality. Looking in the mirror, on the other hand, was for many centuries, without the intervention of the artist, the only way to catch a glimpse of one's own face. However, the inevitable lateral inversion caused by the mirror was an obstacle even for the artist himself. Only "the other" could ever define us as others see us. The advent of photography changed this. Self-identification with one's own "real" image took on a new dimension in a broader social context.

In her series Self-Portraits, Patricia Fexová responds to the situation of our self-identification in the mirror and to the representation of this through painting technique. In fact, she turns the whole current situation upside down by depicting a group of characters from her surroundings in a mirror-reversed form. That is to say, not in the way the figures know themselves from photographs and their identity cards, but in a form that was previously the prerogative of painterly self-portraits in painting. Each of the paintings thus acquires an intimate dimension, accessible only to the depicted, or to their loved ones. For other viewers, however, other moments are revealed. The very moment when we discern a human face with its individual features in the tangle of brushstrokes is made the subject here by the artist. She explores what has always been hidden behind the aura of the artist's expression in the history of modern painting as a specific phenomenon. Her strokes are controlled calligraphic marks rather than expressive gestures. A careful study of the features depicted has enabled her to use this system to create likenesses that evoke the impression of a realistic portrait. But in doing so, if we can forget for a moment our natural reflex of looking for a face, they are also a system in themselves, a kind of representation of the painting process as such. This cycle of "self-portraits" is complemented by the object entitled "The Mirror". In her series Self-Portraits, Patricia Fexová responds to the situation of our self-identification in the mirror and to the representation of this through painting technique. In fact, she turns the whole current situation upside down by depicting a group of characters from her surroundings in a mirror-reversed form. That is to say, not in the way the figures know themselves from photographs and their identity cards, but in a form that was previously the prerogative of painterly self-portraits in painting. Each of the paintings thus acquires an intimate dimension, accessible only to the depicted, or to their loved ones. For other viewers, however, other moments are revealed. The very moment when we discern a human face with its individual features in the tangle of brushstrokes is made the subject here by the artist. She explores what has always been hidden behind the aura of the artist's expression in the history of modern painting as a specific phenomenon. Her strokes are controlled calligraphic marks rather than expressive gestures. A careful study of the features depicted has enabled her to use this system to create likenesses that evoke the impression of a realistic portrait. But in doing so, if we can forget for a moment our natural reflex of looking for a face, they are also a system in themselves, a kind of representation of the painting process as such. This cycle of "self-portraits" is complemented by the object entitled "The Mirror".

The rearrangement of the sides of the human face, whose irregularity is a multiplier of the possible number of individual human forms, became for Patricia Fex a starting point not only for reflection on the contemporary position of the painterly portrait, but also on the contemporary perception of the form of human individuality in general. Certainly she does not offer here a universal prescription for solving the question of the contemporary painterly portrait, but she nevertheless provides an essential contribution to the discussion of this, even today, very important problem.  
Viktor Čech