LENKA VÍTKOVÁ / THE BODY´S ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS OF FLOWERS

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.

LENKA VÍTKOVÁ / THE BODY´S ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS OF FLOWERS

22.11.2014 - 15.01.2015

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

The Body’s answers to the questions of Flowers is a paraphrase of the verse "The body's answers to the questions of landscape" that is the start of one of the poems included in the collection of Short summer processes by Petr Kabeš. The exhibition's title reminds us of the existence of continuous ongoing dialogue happening on a preconscious or "out of conscious" level: before we are able to realise, or even critically reflect, we have always already, somehow related to the world, and it is through the "interface" of our body that we do this. Painting arises precisely at this interface, which is also one of the reasons, why it does not lose anything in the recency and the intensity with which it can speak to us, although it has been repeatedly neglected in recent decades.

In the MEM gallery Lenka Vítková presents works from the a recent period (the first paintings were started in late summer, some are only a few weeks old). In the exhibiton the paintings of flowers take turns with figural paintings which repeat the same female figure theme, bent at the waist so that the hands are touching the ground. The center of gravity of the bent body moves down and forward, closer to the ground. Unlikely to be a dancing figure, a special exercise? Head facing down and pelvis pushed forward: the body is shown free of any symbolism, additionally it stands on "all four". However the animality of this position is not in any way degrading. Moreover Lenka Vítková adds to the figures a certain grandeur by the method of applying colour (she emphasises the vertical brush strokes more strongly than detailed modeling). The silhouettes of bent bodies do not carry any story, they speak to us by "the body language" - the same language they answer to the flowers, which the author paints with the same austerity, but with an even stronger passion for colour. The colour palette seems too intense at first glance - all the shades of green, blue and purple, placed in solid lumps, side by side may start to look like a colour card. But, in the end, isn’t each flower with large petals the same fascinating color card of tones and valeurs?

Flowers and bodies without faces. They are objects to be viewed, but they do not look back at us. It is different with a pair of heads. They disturb the continuity of the dialogue that lead paintings on the walls between them. They turn directly at us and therefore give the dialogue a different direction. Maybe it's the dark shadows hiding the eyes that tears apart the conventional scheme of painting exhibitions, in which the audience view reflects from the surface of the wall with hanging paintings. The view of the hidden eyes goes out of the surface, towards me and enables me to realise that my own body is a living thing within the space.

The paintings are born in moments of privacy, in which the mind almost splits up and it‘s particles remain together with pigments firmly fixed to the surface of the painting. They are the result of a quiet conversation and speak to us as well – they let us see, through their surface, something that would otherwise remain hidden inside the human body as in a locked box.

Jan Zálešák

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