ONDŘEJ BASJUK / THE CULT EXHIBITION

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.

ONDŘEJ BASJUK / THE CULT EXHIBITION

15.01.2014 - 05.03.2014

Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Dominican Square 10, Brno
15/1 – 5/3/2014
Opening: 14/1/2014 at 6pm
Curator: Martin Nytra

Basjuk’s game with meanings, character of the depiction and formal methods is based on his own experience, but also on a thorough investigation and is greatly influenced by the aesthetics coming from the illustrations in adventure literature, boys novels and travel books, as well as by the legacy and the morphology of modernism and
the early avant-garde, which are for contemporary art practise appealing and actual again for many reasons. These appropriations, which he approaches consciously and carefully, are mixed with reality and collector items often of East Asian and Buddhist origin. By this a certain aesthetic model is created, which evokes topics that are both esoteric and of an occult nature as well as displaying the idea of an interest in the exotic and so called primitive cultures, which is typical for modern western society. These cultures represent the ideal of the escape and insight into the nature of things, as well as just contemporary fashion. However, as the name of the exhibition, as well
as the work of Ondřej Basjuk, suggest, the project of romantic return or escape is an ideal, it’s perception constantly oscillates between the importance, sincere need, pathos, facileness and sarcastic irony that mocks it’s own lack of freedom, therefore destroying all the myths which arose from the desire of the spirit. It can easily happen that only grimace is created by this, as contemporary trends and affectiation, which depends on our assessment of the importance of autonomy, relation to objectivity, or the definition of true nature.

Martin Nytra

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