PETR DUB / A SURVIVOR’S DIARY

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.

PETR DUB / A SURVIVOR’S DIARY

24.01.2015 - 19.03.2015

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
24/1 – 19/3/2015
Opening: 22/1/2015 at 7pm
Curator: Ondřej Chrobák

Petr Dub is a (post) conceptual artist. He systematically examines the medium of hanging painting, or rather the current position of painting. Dub's paintings are indeed indisputable results of manual, and let us add, often very challenging and sophisticated activity, yet the used verb "examine" is not a meaningless synonym for "painting" in his artistic practice. It primarily refers to the conscious mental activity that precedes the actual process of painting. Petr Dub is also the author of one of the few, if not the only Czech written theoretical study, which reflects the local post-conceptual painting in the context of the current discourse of art. The book, published under the title Selected Post-conceptual Approaches in the Contemporary Czech Painting, was the output of his PhD. studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. Studying in Petr Kvíčala and Milan Houser‘s studio in Brno as well as a one-year internship at the Prague Academy of Arts Architecture & Design of Jiří David and Milan Salák were not in Dub’s case only a formal fulfilling of duties. Petr Dub managed, in confrontation with outstanding, but artistically and humanly different personalities, distill for himself a personal lesson, which forms a compact foundation of his current artistic trajectory. In gastronomy, which was actually the artist's first career choice, it would be an analogy to the format of "fusion cuisine" combining the strong background of Brno conceptualism and the heritage of Prague postmodernism.

The title of the exhibition, A Survivor’s Diary, offers as one of the ways to read it, a commentary on the current situation. As the Survivor, for the reading subject is kept secret, we may appoint the Painting. The conceptual thinking and painting are in local stereotypes considered to be antagonistic directions. The defenders of paintings blame the conceptual approach not only for "incomprehensibility" of contemporary art, but also from the direct participation in the proclamation of the "end of painting", which was mainly understood as an attempt to destroy the competition. In 1997 in Prague's Rudolfinum Gallery there took place a program exhibition focused on the current situation of painting called The last painting. Post-apocalyptic jargon is, since than, a mandatory part of the rhetorical arsenal used to reflect the current status of painting. For Petr Dub, who exists on the tectonic breaking point of two irreconcilable worlds, similar references make flirtatious game. He winks to both sides, but he has already decided to remain single. He acts similarly in his artistic practice. He does not leave the field of traditional hanging painting on purpose. At the same time, however, he applies the strategies that in the history of at least the last fifty years, gradually led to its questioning and rejection. Sci-fi literature works with the possibility of time travel, the intervention in history could change, or rather reverse the present danger. Petr Dub does not seek a revision of history. He knows too much for that. It seems that he rather tries to use the potential that remained fallow in the past on the altar of rapid, avantgarde method. Hybrid status, when an art work contains also the genetic code of its own end and (re) birth represents for us, the survivors, one of the relevant reasons to continue to seriously deal with art.

Ondřej Chrobák

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