TETRADEKAGON/ THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION FOCUSED ON THE YOUNGEST GENERATION

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.

TETRADEKAGON/ THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION FOCUSED ON THE YOUNGEST GENERATION

07.02.2013 - 27.03.2013

Fait Gallery
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
7/2 – 27/3/2013
Opening: 7/2/2013 at 7pm
Curators: Denisa Kujelová and Martin Nytra

The already third » Selection « from the collection of Fait Gallery is this time dedicated entirely to the most recent work of the youngest generation of artists who have just entered in the art scene. The exhibition presents some key work of young artists as well as works indicating their future direction. Chronologically, it directly follows the previous two exhibitions which focused on the Czechoslovak modernism and the art of the second half of the 20th century.

This exhibition, among other things, tries to present the direction in which the contemporary art practice is going. Therefore, the selection of works is not limited thematically or by a medium.

There are classical media, painting, drawing and photography and media quite already common in art profession, such as video art, installations and light installations. The spectrum of approaches is also wide; it ranges from concentrated search of original language in the tradition of abstract painting, conceptual examination of options and nature of drawing, to more literary contents and sensitive exploration of shared intimacy, the relationship between culture, images and memories, to the works that deal with the actual functions of art and semantic shifts thorough time. Art may rely on traditional themes of landscape, figure and space and reformulate the neglected or reveal the paradox of contemporary perspectives of perception and understanding these symbols. The depth and diversity of the spectrum that the contemporary art scene has to offer are represented here, necessarily, fragmentally and incompletely, nevertheless, the selection represents sufficiently a specific range of views and procedures that are discussed and formulated in contemporary art. The unifying element is therefore the time the works were created, our present on which the authors are based and which they reflect, although each in quite peculiar way.

The exhibition presents individual works / collection of works by following artists:
Jan Brož, Katarína Hládeková,
Vendula Knopová, Martin Kocourek, Ondřej Kotrč, Petr Krátký,
Kamila Maliňáková, Pavla Naďová,
Martin Nytra, Johana Pošová,
Adéla Sobotková, Teri Varhol,
Michaela Vrbková & Diana Wink

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