ONDŘEJ HOMOLA / ARANGE

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.

ONDŘEJ HOMOLA / ARANGE

03.04.2013 - 25.05.2013

Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Dominican Square 10, Brno
3/4 - 25/5/2013
Opening: 2/4/2013 at 6pm
Curator: Martin Nytra

The installation by Ondřej Homola builds on illusory banality and dry humor based on semiotic play with the meanings of similar-sounding words „the arrangement“ and „orange“, creating a prima facie absurd and senseless situation. This relationship results from the emotions and associations that both expressions evoke. The feeling of absurdity is amplified at the idea of neatly composed pyramids of oranges in the greengrocers department, that is actually - in our cultural environment - better known from the movies and shopping during the holidays by the sea, makes this picture as a demonstration of superfluity almost ideal. At the same time it points to the interchangeability of subject and object of an art piece. The exhibition title The Arrangement also relates to this and it deliberately works with the phenomenon of the ideal of beauty by the way of depicting the appropriate ways of adjustment, presentation and construction or deconstruction of concepts. In our case, it refers in particular to modernity and a substantive man's relationship to the object, which attributes the high aesthetic quality, which consequently generates and multiplies by the characteristic way of life of the consumer society, and which thus acquires an existential nature. The individual exhibited artworks interpret the aesthetics and the art language of modernism in relation to the objectives and resources within the context of applied art and promotional art and thus refer generally to the avant-garde role in the transformation of societal values and perception of reality. In the process of deconstruction and construction therefore the means becomes the target. The physical figure breaks down into a 3D and mechanical model that supports the mold, devoid of its the symbolic function, but liberated and imbued with the spirit of the new beauty.

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