Maľba za hranicami ľudskej tvorby. Dekoloniálne a posthumanistické reflexie s dôrazom na mimoľudské autorstvo
Painting Beyond the Human. Decolonial and Posthuman Rethinkings through Nonhuman Authorship

Summary/Abstract: This study reframes painting as an ecologically entangled and epistemically decentered practice by foregrounding nonhuman authorship as a constitutive force of pictorial formation. It examines two case studies positioned along an authorship spectrum that extends from multispecies co-production to fully nonhuman image-making. The first case, the garden-based practice of Slovak artist Andrej Dúbravský, demonstrates how painting emerges within a porous, more-than-human ecology in which insects, plants, spores, and climatic forces materially intervene in the formation of the work. Situated within posthumanist theory and decolonial critique, his practice rejects the extractive gaze of colonial landscape and botanical representation, instead proposing a model of situated, reciprocal composition in which authorship is distributed across species and environments. The second case considers biopatina—the chromatic deposits produced by microbial growth on architectural surfaces—as a form of nonhuman painting. Algae, fungi, and cyanobacteria generate unsolicited, durational pigmentary inscriptions that challenge human-centered definitions of artistic agency and the modernist ideal of the “clean” architectural façade. Read together, these examples call for a theoretical rearticulation of painting as a more-than-human process: one in which pigment may be grown rather than applied, surfaces function as sites of ecological inscription, and authorship shifts from individual mastery to relational, multispecies co-creation. Such an expanded framework opens painting to posthuman and decolonial methodologies that acknowledge ecological agency, unsettle anthropocentric hierarchies, and reposition visual production within broader networks of environmental and political entanglement.

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