FOR MANY DIFFERENT EARS / THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

The Spectres in the House exhibition marks Bárta's return to the Fait Gallery MEM space after eight years. He has filled this time with work on drawings and paintings, the DNA of which he weaves together from sequences of modernist painting, architectural features, and building and workshop practice. Bárta's new paintings are also rooted in architecture. This time, however, it is as if architecture spawned its own ghosts.

The canvas surfaces of Barta's latest paintings are often conceived as imaginary walls that stand between two spaces. The events in his painterly intentions take place between these three elements: the two spaces and the partition between them. Such pictures inevitably trigger a "reverse course" through the history of European painting, back to Leon Battista Alberti's reflections on the construction of picture space which he put forward in his seminal work De pictura (1435). Yer they might equally be considered in relation to the present.

Instead of a well-organised geometrical fiction of the renaissance pictorial space, followed by a massive cloud of variations on the themes of space and perspective, Tomáš Bárta offers ambiguous spatial relations with a number of internal paradoxes, as well as an illusion of the objects that inhabit these paintings and pass through their plans. By using the motifs of niche and window, or a depression and opening in the surface, he stages an optical interplay with the visual principles of "inside", "outside", "through", "in front of", "above", "below", "over", "in the foreground", "in the background", "between", etc. Although he has one entire wall in his studio covered with brief sketches that make the basic outlines of his future pictures, from the beginning their painting is essentially subordinated to the adventure of immediate construction. The layers and spatial planes of the paintings are created gradually and "unplanned". As a result, they form a relation system; they involve visual paradoxes in a spatial composition.

Bárta's "paradoxical spaces" can be approached as a game with the mimetic aspects of painting. However, they touch upon the most common experiences of the modern man. In the past, Bárta's paintings were frequently reminiscent of the morphology of hi-tech architecture, whose morphology would be impossible to achieve without the massive use of computer technology, or the immersive environment of some computer games, through which we enter worlds that are different in varying degrees from those we physically inhabit. Recently, this area has been enriched by synthetic images created by artificial intelligence. Its potential seems infinite, and that includes a new wealth of possible mistakes that the learning but young machines are making. We usually consider these to be flaws that confirm to vain humans that machine-programmes have not yet achieved our ability to perfectly mimic reality (albeit with the help of other machines and tools). From another angle, however, these new worlds, with all their shortcomings, expand the horizon of the collective imagination about the potential parameters of reality. In a sense, they move the discoveries that visual artists have been making for over a century into the realm of everyday reality. If we focus exclusively on what contemporary technologies bring to our imaginations of space, it is precisely the multiplication and overlapping of perspectives and the loosening of ties to our sensory-bodily experience. And this includes spectres - moments of seeing when we perceive primarily the incoherence and inconsistence of sensory information, moments when perception is inconsistent with our experience, or with "common sense" (sensus communis).

The pictures by Tomáš Bárta (b. 1982) are not paintings "after artificial intelligence" or with its help. Nevertheless, they do reflect the shifts in the perception of reality that the increasingly dominant technologies of visual production are leading us towards.

FOR MANY DIFFERENT EARS / THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

23.11.2013 - 13.03.2014

Fait Gallery
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
23/11 – 13/3/2014
Opening: 21/11/2013 at 7pm
Curators: Denisa Kujelová

This time the selection from the collection is not defined by generations, but by thematic linking of selected works across the generational range of artists represented in the collection, in order to find characteristic features of their work and put it in the context of the development of modern art and it‘s resonances in the present. The central themes are tone and line, icon and character, mutual correlations and contrasts between the different art works, both paradigmatic and syntagmatic. The title of the exhibition "For many different ears" in accordance with the parallel of the position of contemporary art, directly refers to the eponymous essay from a set of theoretical writings Modern Artistic Expression, in which Josef Čapek defends the character of modern art in the contemporary context by an appeal to the viewer's open-mindedness and with his ability of sharp and synthetical perception.

The confrontation of authors from several generations allows for the possibility to revise the established categories and terminology of historically proven practise. The attitudes of the individual authors disagree on many levels, but they are connected by the line of abstraction, conceptual refining of the art work idea and thoughtout use of expressive means. The mind precisely formulating the idea of the art work and a control of all aspects of the artistic production. Although the present art pieces declare their rationality by their intellectual overlap, we can say that all these works are characterized by a high degree of sensitivity. Despite all the noise, it is possible to discover that silence is an important theme of the exhibition. Silence as an aim or origin, or as the beginning of the end. Therefore it is better to speak about the intellect that has the ability to perceive the areas of knowledge, which are on the other hand hardly translated into a structured and semantically unambiguous message by speech. Relationships among the artworks are anticipated with respect to the relative boundaries of defining concepts, the entities of the art pieces themselves and the audience. The present art pieces also consciously work with time, which in this case falls apart and becomes a general and abstract concept, or they assure us about it’s presence and flow by cooperation between visual and audio features. The enthusiasm of forms projecting a vision of the future blends with the retrospection in a melancholic mood.

The title of the exhibition is therefore offered as a kind of metaphor for perception of the art pieces, inseparatebly linked to the context and the viewer's own experience as a multi-layered process, during which the meaning of modern art is created.

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