ONE MOMENT / Collector's cycle of important private collections Part two: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY / Jiří Valoch´s 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.

ONE MOMENT / Collector's cycle of important private collections Part two: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY / Jiří Valoch´s collection

22.11.2014 - 15.01.2015

Fait Gallery
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
22/11/2014 – 15/1/2015
Opening: 20/11/2014 at 7pm
Curator: Ondřej Chrobák

The series ONE MOMENT continues with a representative selection from the collection of Jiří Valoch. The character of Jiří Valoch, a theorist, a curator and an artist, has become in many ways a synonym for the art scene in Brno for last five decades. However, the range of his activities significantly exceeded more than a local level. He definitely deserves the current acknowledgement of his key role in introducing and putting over of conceptual art, not only in the Czech Republic, but also a broader Central European context. The creation of a personal collection has been an integral part of artistic, theoretical and practical life for Jiří Valoch. Unlike the classic collections created by art lovers, Jiří Valoch´s collection fullfilled primarily a need for a documentary personal archive. This does not mean that it was not built based on brilliant taste, opinion and passion. The opposite is true. The current sample, which is the first public presentation of the legendary and full of legends collection, is also a preview of an extensive project of the Moravian Gallery in Brno dedicated to the great person Jiří Valoch.

Over forty works shown from more than twenty artists exhibited in Fait Gallery represents only a fragment of a Jiří Valoch’s colossal collection. In 2002 Jiří Valoch handed over to the Prague National Gallery a selection of more than three thousands art works. However the current exhibition didn’t have to use this source. The exhibition also primarily focuses on paintings, sculptures and objects, leaving aside, except of a few exceptions, the works on paper, which otherwise represent a significant part of the collection. We need to emphasise, that all the authors represented in the collection can also be traced in the theoretical reflections by Jiří Valoch. He analysed their works in detail in the opening texts for exhibitions, which he prepared as a curator as well or in reviews and essays in professional journals. Many of the exhibitions he prepared for the Brno House of Arts, where he worked between 1972 and 2001. He also maintained regular personal contact with most of the artists and he significantly influenced many of them. From this perspective there is no parallel to Valoch‘s collection within the Czech context.

Ondřej Chrobák

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