JIŘÍ THÝN / THE TWO ENDS OF A DISTANCE – THE PICTURES THAT HAVE NEVER HAPPENED

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.

JIŘÍ THÝN / THE TWO ENDS OF A DISTANCE – THE PICTURES THAT HAVE NEVER HAPPENED

28.03.2015 - 21.05.2015

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Strret), Brno
28. 3. - 21. 5. 2015
Opening: 26. 3. 2015 at 7pm
Curator: Jiří Ptáček

About the Study, Nonnarrative Photography, Gesture and Poetry

About The Study. The photographer Jiří Thýn held three exhibitions in 2011-2012, called Basic Studies. The term study could have been understood in the way of its conventional use by artists - such as a survey or preliminary preparation. However, we use Basic Studies in various fields of scientific knowledge to gain the first set of relevant data, which is used as a basis for further work. One way or another, by these exhibitions Thýn initiated a phase of work, where it has been noted in advance, that it actually precedes something. The manifestation of the importance of subsequent, yet not completed step, referred to the inherent unpent of seemingly definitive exhibition shape and emphasised the importance of continuity. In 2014 Thýn again felt the need to return to the format of the study and the first of two solo exhibitions of that year called Basic Studies / Nonnarrative Photography.

The Nonnarrative Photography. Thýn found the concept of nonnarrative photography after a few years of exploring the influence of technical procedures to the construction and operation of the photographic depiction. Quite naturally he got close to the avantgarde photography of the 20th century and the theme of abstraction in photography. He was intrigued by the problematic use of this term in the case of medium, the essence of which is always a capture of light leaning into material reality in a specific timeframe. Instead of abstraction as such he proposed to deal with photohraphy, where the boundaries of a story and narration are being tested.

The radius of nonnarrative photography has gradually expanded through all Basic Studies and other Thýn´s exhibitions. Based on this there are also Two Ends of A Distancein both variants: a Prague one from the French Institute and a Brno one, with the subtitle The Pictures That Have Never Happened. During this continuous process, there was a significant, though still almost unnoticed turnover in Thýn´s creative approach.

About The Gesture. First, however let´s briefly stop by the gesture and the two, one quickly succeeding another, exhibitions Basic Studies / Nonnarrative Photography and Consciousness As A Fundamental Attribute I, II in 2014. Thýn showed photographs of magazine reproductions cut through by a few lumped cuts with a scalpel. That brings into the show a physical gesture and a relation between an image and a body. Actually these gestures did not have a nature of unaware, unconditioned movement. In the text Thýn presented the background of these interventions as a result of a wide spectrum of conditionality:

"Precondition of shape, precondition of lie, precondition of emptiness, precondition of space, precondition of desire, precondition of dependence, precondition of emotions, precondition of time, precondition of beginning, precondition of end, precondition of form, precondition of beauty... "

By the long list of presumptions Thýn tried to emphasise the multiplicity of active subjects in being with the image, covered by the consciousness as a whole. Cutting into the photos was their physical "reading" and also factual and semantic flexion. The importance of generalisation / abstraction (as the particular goal and a specific result) can not be – at the nonnarrative photography - questioned.

About The Poetry. The Two Ends of A Distanceis not a study, but one of the syntheses, which continuously build a kind of island of the application. Thýn again intervenes in magazine and newspaper photos, this time by a wider range of methods and materials. Although these are story pictures (scenes), he again eliminates their informative value. A word is dragged into the situation, in which its theoretical basis is articulated as a poem. This fits best to Thýn´s main intention of creating a lyrical transmutation of the epic theme.

The Pictures That Have Never Happened. In his new photographs Jiří Thýn proceeds from specific to general. By his intervention he transforms a particular person in a specific situation into a figure rooted to its place and space of the picture. The testimony of emotion is transferred to the expression of emotion. He proceeds in accordance with the "presumptions" of shape, form, beauty, etc. Instead of analysing the photographic language for which his earlier work was valued, he focuses to the symbolic manifestation of the hypnotic power of pictures, which rises in the irreducible synergy of cultural memory, instincts and unconscious archetypal patterns. Thus the subtitle of the exhibition could be paraphrased as "pictures that have not happened, although they exist."

Jiří Ptáček

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