Václav Stratil / Landscapes

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.

Václav Stratil / Landscapes

15.06.2016 - 19.11.2016

Fait Gallery
Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
21. 9. - 19. 11. 2016
Vernissage: 21. 9. 2016 at 7pm
Curator: Jiří Ptáček

The further extended continuation of Stratil’s exhibition Landscapes shows the next chapters in the life work of the Brno painter, illustrator and performer in relation to his friends, colleagues and students. Besides the older and often legendary works (legendary because they are brought to the younger generation by the memories of the older generation) we also introduce the artist's current work with photos and text. The main theme of the exhibition Landscapes, however, is the relationship to others and showing yourself in "analog" social networking and communication.

Resumption of the second, further extended completed version of Stratil’s exhibition will, in addition, become an opportunity to release the author’s new music album "Láška" (translation note: play on words, seems to be pointing to the word ‘Love’), which was created with the contribution of the Fait Gallery. "The album „Láška“ with old as well as new songs is the second set of Stratil’s musical production.

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"It was not just a repetition of the act of usurping of the classic works and reproducing them under his own name, because objectively and for Stratil's also subjectively it could have worked just with Boštík with all aspects that this exact option has, starting with the fact that Stratil is Boštík‘s younger friend, who really loves him, despite the fact that just Boštík’s works really have the spiritual quality that makes them something extraordinary, to the the fact that Boštík is now primarily a subject of a market and a victim of our fast newly rich."1 A passage from a text by Jiří Valoch, written a year after Stratil exhibited photographic enlargements of black and white reproductions of paintings by Václav Boštík2, seems to be an appropriate introduction to the topic of the exhibition Landscapes. On the one hand Valoch mentiones basic statements that led to its organisation, but using specific examples it points out the layers of meaning, which in our case, are specifically because of the chosen concept, suppressed. The semantic and contextual diversity of Stratil‘s works here is suppressed by the conceptual key of the exhibition, which is observing the artist's creative approach to other people and their work.

Should the key fulfil its purpose, it is necessary for it to unlock the room, or at least the door of the house. At the exhibition, where we, next to Boštík‘s reproductions, present a photo album from the second half of the nineties, in which Stratil handled the personal and family history in different ways, or album created by his father and exhibited by the artist as ready-made, but also for example the "mutual monochromes" with Jan Nálevka from the end of the same decade or recent, partner-painted paintings with Martin Helán, however, we can still trace Stratil’s continuous interest in "authorial connection". Provided Jiří Valoch in his text says that the usurpation could work just with Boštík,3 he covers the aspects of intimacy and intensity that Stratil is attracted to in the long term. If we mention, for example, "stealing" of the principle of symmetrical portraits from the photo collection by Jiří David Hidden forms (1991-1995) and their use for self-portraits (1998)4, or the colouring in of his father's teaching tables (Latin, 2009), a strong personal relationship was always a fundamental dimension which preceded the creation of such works. The variable in this direction was (and remains) only the level of articulation of the relationship and of course the role of collective work, citation or appropriation in the context of contemporary theoretical debates. Should his works, in the nineties, be seen as a commentary on the identity of the image and the importance of authorship, or as movements in quadrature proximity-distance-originality-non originality, ie within the intellectual horizons of this phase of Czech post-modernism, with the transition into the new millennium there has been increasingly promoted the perspective of personal involvement.

Stratil‘s motive may be based on the relation to another person, but also on a specific artistic collection or an individual art piece. It can not be strange to him, it must catch him, he must be interested, or at least be irritatred. "The combination of modernism and postmodernism," thus happens somehow unusually - as calling the personal commitment and intimacy back into the spotlight.

The title of this exhibition is derived from a photo collection Czech landscape (1998-1999)5. That was arranged by Stratil as a map of his professional partners and friends. If these photos appear alongside other series, such as photographic Couples (2002-2003 and 2015-2016), we want to emphasise this very level of personal maps. The thoroughness and persistence of drawing through out is the first aspect that does not have a competition in the Czech art scene. The second and even more important aspect for us, is the increasing need for an intense relationship. Without wanting to prefer its psychological interpretation, we need to realise that we see Stratil as a solitaire focused mainly on the investigation of himself. The exhibition Landscapes does not deny this dimension of his artistic work, but reminds us of the importance of establishing a relationship and its public manifestation of a coherent and distinct line within his work. I would not be surprised, however, if you would have, besides intellectual game, passion, humor or pathos, also noticed loneliness that fatally follows those who so strongly urge for the other person.

1. Valoch, Jiří: The art combining modernism and postmodernism. In: Daněk, Ladislav (ed.): Václav Stratil / Drawings 1955-2000. Olomouc Art Museum, Olomouc 2000, pp. 65.

2. Václav Stratil. Collective exhibition, Nová síň Gallery, Prague 1997.

3. Also important was the resemblance of the enlarged reproductions of Boštík’s pictures with Stratil’s ink cross-hatching drawings from the second half of the 80s.

4. Václav Stratil. Hidden forms. Behémót Gallery, Prague, 1998.

5. In the enlargements of the publicly presented one only once so far – at the exhibition with the same name in Malá galerie Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague (1999).

T: Jiří Ptáček

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