JAKUB HOŠEK / CHAOS IS ORDER NOT YET UNDERSTOOD

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.

JAKUB HOŠEK / CHAOS IS ORDER NOT YET UNDERSTOOD

18.03.2015 - 30.04.2015

Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Dominican Square 10, Brno
18. 3. - 30. 4. 2015
Opening: 17. 3. 2015 at 6pm
Curator: Lumír Nykl

„Why do so many new abstractions look the same?" - Jerry Saltz, critic and theorist

„He is known to absorb all the flyers, album covers, blogs ... and then he gets it all out of himself in the studio" - Jan Lesák, visual artist, photographer

„I have already said to Hošek that the most beautiful thing on the exhibition was the radiator." - Karel Císař, theorist and curator

„Eight golden rings as if I was Shab-Shabba Ranks" - Darold Ferguson Jr., rapper and singer

„Chaos is order yet undeciphered" - that is the introducing sentence of Denise Villeneuve’s movie Enemy. This fits very well to the description of the contemporary art and the exhibition of Jakub Hošek.

The compulsive need to find the cipher to his work hangs in a shared gallery climate every time, the fragments of shapes (either texts or pictures), he has impounded, leave the comfort zone of their original carrier. The characters then occupy space stretched beyond the reserved dimensions and levels of meaning.

In the "auteur" movie Enemy Denis Villeneuve develops the idea of Alfred Hitchcock, which touches film and imitation in general - „If you meet your lookalike, you should kill him." The promise of understanding to the well arranged order in a chaotic web of symbols in Enemy is subject to (self-) destructive, (self-) identification of the identical lookalike. In the case of Jakub Hošek this ambiguous relationship can be seen mainly on the level of the key process of transferring carved drawing templates to a canvas otherwise processed as a "painting". As an implication the key drawings give the final object a possibility to be created thanks to their distruction. The free ride on the hanging painting is what makes the three-dimensional object what it is. These characteristics of used techniques and media Jakub Hošek uses as a theme since the time of study at the Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of V. Skrepl and J. Kovanda. The exhibition in the FAIT GALLERY PREVIEW takes place before his residency at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul and subsequent scholarship in Tabačka Kulturfabrik – a cultural center in the eastern Slovakian town of Kosice.

In the movie Enemy we do not find out whether both of the lookalikes have a scar in the same place. The order to the chaos of their resemblances is brought by a sore imprint of a ring worn by only one of them.

The understanding is a mutual, time-consuming process compared to the privileged, distant decryption. When you decrypt the object it is subordinate to the colonizing hunter of the meaning. In the act of understanding the viewer and the image have a similar relationship to that seen between drawing and painting in Jakub Hošek’s work, between the flat painting and the three-dimensional object, between a sign and an ornament. As people say: we usually start to understand the text once we stop following it.

The flat hanging painting changes in the three-dimensional box. The cutter is thus connected by a brush stroke. The ring serves as a boxer. Acrylic tattoos the canvas.

The change is possible as long as the term period is replaced by a simple piece of information edited in the social networks.

The described characteristics of the Jakub Hošek’s art work explain the meaning of overlaping of the first and the second/the chaos and the order. The assumptions of his work can be compared to a specially conceived process of superimposition - covering of an already existing image by another. Jakub Hošek acknowledges this method by a conscious reference to this word in an otherwise unusual plural - Superimpositions, which is the title of the new album by the experimental electronic producer Lorenzo Senni.

The critic Alexander Iadarola (Quietus, dismagazine, Rhizome) notes Senni‘s sinister aspect of the superimposition. "Whereas with palimpsests one can see the traces of previous writers' markings as they're written the effaced over, with a superimposition there's no trace, no hint of what was before". The area of design and fine arts have already overlaped a long time ago at least in the consensual label of the artwork - "a piece". In the global arts community the term piece is as popular as the term "track" within the club music scene. Piece sounds equally expressive and convincing, especially considering the nature of Hošek‘s images.

In the well arranged area of a white showroom a value of one piece corresponds with the value of another one. This isomorphic relationship is also characteristic for objects - forms on the picture - between them. The uniformity also establishes the relationship of the shown forms towards their physical carrier. Of a final piece and the cardboard models, sentenced to the fate of being waste material. The exhibition, understood in the general sense of exposing the objects to human view, actually begins and ends with a gallery shop window, where the residual cardboard represents a sort of preview of the author's main method, metaphorically also a preview of his studio and portfolio. We can remember his exhibition in Ostrava Industrial Gallery in 2013 and the installation solution of adjusting the preparatory drawings on paper to the level of works on canvas. But especially here resonates his well-known project called Let me rule in Jiří Švestka Gallery, where the studio chaos was scenographically transferred and copied in the ratio of one to one.

Style known from Let me rule dominates even in the (...) previously unrecognised order. Recognisable style that can be conveniently described by the familiar English word creepy.

Parts of cut hands are touching crooked, jagged, almost "crossed" wasters of the original shapes. Swollen and frayed tissue that has lost prosthetic drawing, are chaotically crawling over each other and seeking support in the precisely made and graduated surface. The degrees of the surface are being given to us in one lot and as tightly as barbed wire allows.

The paintings by Jakub Hošek behave like an evil twin and hurt even what is depict.

The quotations do not refer to the source, the cutter works as it should only at the final stopper.

The blending of the shapes is always an intersection at first, no form passes through the another one unscathed.

Hošek‘s often attributed comic abbreviation is associated with the image of the latent immobilisation of animated film sequences, where the chaos of a pair of images is moved to the proper movement by a human agent. He takes on the form of the hands, eyes, or a false frame as a trickish, crippled lookalike. And if he is not destroyed in the logic of Hitchcock’s quoted aphorism, he is trying to move the current viewer to understand and protect him.

Against what? Perhaps against the diffusion of the wild culture, ie unframed areas, "which do not have any denotation", as we are informed by the Bourriaudious Daily application. Adverse uncomfortable sensations and our memories jump at us from Jakub Hošek’s picture as spam, and a creepy adware ad:

"Eat this and you will never want to paint again. The doctors call this the cutter for the art. "

Lumír Nykl

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