The Truthally

First, the rope. It drops vertically from the top edge, twisted and taut, as if something were hanging from it — or as if it had just been hauled up from the deep. Everything below holds on to it: tangled fibres, crumpled fabric, fragments of netting that spread sideways like roots, blood vessels, mycelium. The Truthally does not depict a net. It shows what remains of one once it stops being a tool and begins to become a body.

Pfishova works with material the world has discarded — worn agricultural netting, fishing nets, cords, scraps of fabric. In Ghost Nets · Black Soul she returns to the phenomenon of the ghost net: fishing gear abandoned at sea that belongs to no one and yet goes on catching for years, until it breaks down into invisible dust. But she does not illustrate an ecological disaster. She weaves the waste into the canvas and floods it with black until it can no longer be read as rubbish. What remains is matter: dense, folded, glistening with oil in places, elsewhere as matte as scorched skin. What interests her is what remains after use — after a person, after a life.

On the left the fabric curls into shell-like, organic forms. You can find an eye in them, an ear, an embryo — something caught in the middle of becoming, and the ambiguity is the point. Pfishova has worked in black for years, not to conceal but to make the eye slow down. In monochrome what matters is the light gliding over the raised surfaces and the shadow sinking into the crevices. The work has to be walked around, approached, stepped back from. It gives itself up in layers.

The title is a neologism. Inside it you hear truth, but also truthfully, totally and ally, and that suspension between words is the work itself. The truth at stake here is not laid out on the surface; it is entangled, dredged up from the bottom together with whatever held it captive. It can be painful — but it can also be an ally: the thing that lets us name a harm, both the one done to the sea and the one we carry within ourselves.

In the lower part the matter loosens and trickles downward, like threads, seaweed, traces of water. The net that was meant to catch is itself caught, and changed. Beneath it all runs the awareness of death that has been with Pfishova since childhood — not mourning, but a ground to see from. What we cast off keeps catching. And so the question The Truthally leaves us with is not only what have we thrown away — but what have we pushed to the bottom within ourselves that still holds us in its mesh?