PAVLA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

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.

PAVLA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

27.09.2014 - 13.11.2014

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
27/9 – 13/11/2014
Opening: 25/9/2014 at 7pm
Curator: Jan Zálešák

How many things that surround us do we really understand? But we can still use them, touch them, speak to them, put them into motion. This deep, while unconscious understanding that seems to be inscribed in the motions and that is build by motions, touches and gestures, takes an important place in the work of Pavla Sceranková.

In the early stages of her career, Pavla Sceranková was searching for ways to "animate" - how to depict or categorize movement - while remaining in the area of sculpture or object creation. An example result of this search are the objects from the cycle Memory as a new reality (2006). A slightly different approach has been used in a more recent series of objects Yes or No (2010). Items that we well know as silent partners in our rooms and kitchens (lamp, porcelain dinner service) seem to explode in front of us, but just before the fractions have managed to fly in all directions, someone pressed the PAUSE button. In addition to works in which the motion remains only a kind of unfinished option Sceranková also creates sculptures and objects, that the audience can touch, and therefore they can not only by looking, but also by moving update the contents that are placed in them.

The installation in the Fait Gallery MEM is loosely based on the author's exhibitions Woman on the Moon (Old Town Hall GHMP, 2013) and Constellation (Atrium MG in Brno, 2013). In both she was searching for ways to expand the dimensions of the viewer's experience and understanding tied to personal and physical experience of a metaphorical move in the universe. Great and for the vast majority of people a truly unimaginable size of the world "out there" in these exhibitions formed a counterpoint to the "small" human experience again based in "small", familiar subjects.

The form of the installation in the MEM gallery was significantly influenced by meetings with Dr. Bruno Jungwiert from the Galaxies department at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Discussions with an expert on the dynamics and the evolution of galaxies brought Pavla Sceranková to a key theme of the exhibition, which is the collision of galaxies. In order to appreciate the drama of this event, we must be able to think in scales and in time periods that almost exceed our imagination. If the human observer was inside such a collision, he would not, because of the vast distances between (potentially) conflicting elements, notice anything at all.

This paradox intrigued the author and the desire to let the audience literally enter into the colliding structures became the starting point in the design of the exhibition. The symbolic move into intergalactic space is, on the material level of the installations, connected with the intimate space of the kitchen or the dining room - the space, which, aside from the already somehow outdated cultural stereotype characterising it as a purely female area, is primarily a family space, a space of harmony, but also an arena of conflicts and battles. If we put a piece of saucer or pot mounted to the end of the rotatable structure into motion, we risk a real crash and also animate a model of the universe. Therefore there is a crash of not only incommensurable formats, but also incommensurable time dimensions. The human time in which we are born, die, fall in love and hold deep hate is, in the context of "space-time" of a galactic collision, completely worthless. But maybe the opposite is also true, when a scientific version of the absolute crumbles under emotions, that may be put into a motion by a piece of rotating kitschy chinoiserie...

Jan Zálešák

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