TOMÁŠ ABSOLON / MONET ON MY MIND

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.

TOMÁŠ ABSOLON / MONET ON MY MIND

10.12.2014 - 16.01.2015

Fait Gallery Preview
Dominican Square 10, Brno
10/12/2014 – 16/1/2015
Opening: 9/12/2014 at 6pm
Curator: Martin Nytra

The main point of interest for Tomáš Absolon is a painting, which, in his concept, can be understood as an interface between depiction and abstraction. However, rather than this subtle line, the author devotes much more attention to work with visual shortcuts and means of painting, including the expression and gesture.

Absolon focuses on the relationship of the painting and reality, which the painting reproduces and also co-creates, and therefore Absolon understands it as a communication tool that uses its own language, but also as a specific kind of experience. This interest is also reflected in the use of a series of formal elements such as fragments and lines that work with both the viewer's visual memory, and with his psychology, creating a constant tension, which is caused by efforts to decipher these characters. In the works from recent years we can find the principle of gradual serial exploring the possibilities and limits of a rather narrowly defined repertoire of motifs, such as a repetitive composition scheme, or a similar way of working with painter’s gesture. At the same time this process is also part of a deeper awareness of their unmistakable characteristics and potential.

If we should describe Tomáš Absolon’s work in a certain context, we could include it into a broader discourse of referring to the specific conditions of the medium and its history. The basic set of elements, that the paintings work with, is partly based on an extensive fund of abstract painting. We could also mention the trends in contemporary art and reflect certain ideas taken out of the object-oriented ontology and theoretical thinking about the nature and functioning of various visual strategies of product design. Principles derived from these two areas and derived meanings are the first visible platform where there's a majority of their interpenetration, concurrence and contradictions with which the author works.

A particular importance in Absolon’s work occupies a specific opposite system of compositions, based on which there are, side by side, designed elements of a more technical nature in contact with colored valeurs, atmospheric effects and other impressions, which we could put in the category of symbols that represent a rather sensual and spiritual sphere, or are also often perceived as an expression of the artist's inner emotions. At the same time they are also known symbols and strategies that have found wider use across the whole spectrum of cultural production and therefore there is perhaps nothing else to do than to refer to them with appropriate distance and irony. And so the name of this exhibition could actually be a really successful slogan.

Martin Nytra

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