Radek Brousil / HANDS CLASPED

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.

Radek Brousil / HANDS CLASPED

07.10.2015 - 04.12.2015

Fait Gallery Preview

Dominican Square 10, Brno

7. 10. - 4. 12. 2015

Opening: 6. 10. 2015 at 6pm
Curator: Jiří Ptáček

Photographer: Michaela Dvořáková

In accordance with the creative principles of the last years Radek Brousil bases his work on the set of photographic objects and photographs for the exhibition Hands Clasped on his own studio practice. In the past, for example, he put in front of the lens the technical equipment of his studio. By this he brought forward not only the existence of tools that in the background actually influence the design of photographic works, but at the same time he was dealing with them as with the "normal models", and he used them for the still life, or for a figure or geometric abstraction.

At the Hands Clasped exhibition the aim and approach are a bit different. The pictures are inspired by studio photographs of liquid and elastic materials and a decision to abandon the traditional format and move the photographs to another dimension. From a semantic point of view, he has actually transferred himself from the photographs as images of reality to their autonomous features - especially the physical, material nature of enlargements. When we are ashamed to say that the photographs are images, without feeling the obligation to add that they are also physical objects, on the top of that objects scenically structuring the white gallery space, we actually personally experience their unusual hybridity. We can, of course, approach them as kind of transformers, that are always what we want them to be, but at the same time we must admit that by this we do not cover their ambiguity enough. But Brousil´s aim is not to expose the inconsistency, but to make real the interleave of two realities of the photos in our minds. Perhaps, that´s why we can – among the scenes in photographs, their formats, and installation – still recognise relationships. Brousil takes into account the dynamics of scenes and derives from them shape and spatial position of the artifacts. The key terms for him are flexibility and fixation, pressure and strain, and the catharsis and movement.

These key concepts can remind us of the intentions of the early avant-garde, not only in the field of photography – for example of futurism. Brousil´s photography (and everything how he proceeds the photos) rather points towards the "outside world and society", towards how we perceive photographs and how we think about them.

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