Tomáš Bárta / External Setup

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.

Tomáš Bárta / External Setup

15.06.2016 - 30.07.2016

Fait Gallery MEM
Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
15. 6. - 30. 7. 2016
Vernissage: 15. 6. 2016 at 7pm
Curator: Jiří Havlíček

In 1844, a British hardware store owner Charles Barnard introduced the first machine-made fencing mesh. For this invention he was inspired by the mechanical loom. Shortly after, the French engineer Joseph Louis Lambot used the wire mesh to reinforce concrete. In 1848 Lambot constructed a concrete boat and stiffened its bottom with wire mesh. The first one was three and a half meters long, over a meter wide and sixty-five cm deep. The second one was slightly smaller - three meters long and fifty-three cm deep. He tested the boats on lake Miraval, where one of them was photographed whilst being anchored by the shore.1 After more than a hundred years, two damaged pieces were lifted from the muddy bottom, one of them is still on display in a museum in Lambot's hometown, Brignoles.2 In 1901 the American inventor John C. Perry patented the method for welding wire mesh3. His original intention was a serial production of fences. Shortly after launch, however, metal bars found another use. First, they were used to reinforce roads and pavements, later served as reinforcement of concrete floors and walls of buildings made out of concrete. All floors of the Empire State Building, at the time the highest building in the world, are reinforced by wire mesh. Although the skyscraper is almost a hundred years old, and since its building it has undergone several renovations, the original reinforced concrete floors still remain unchanged.

Modifying a building requires some internal discipline from the architect. The outer design of the structure is a visible part of the surroundings, while at the same time it is pointing to the actual hidden purpose. On the facade of the house we can usually feel when the inside is without a heart. Our inner experience forms our exterior settings. We can feel similar tensions from the large-format drawings by Tomáš Bárta. They are internal messages in the form of complicated construction drawings. The drops of apathy are dripping down a pale forehead. Concentration turns into an impenetrable tangle of lines in the surface of a picture. Bright lines on a dark background penetrate and overlap each other. They point to what they hide. As Bruno Latour writes - the network is our ship. The network, which is a more flexible term than a system, older than a term structure, more empirical than a term complexity. Interconnection is everywhere, but more and more hidden. From time to time there is a break in a regular grid, a facade starts slowly to transform. Lines do not tie together with each other, the connection is interrupted. The ship starts to sink.

T: Jiří Havlíček

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