Valentýna Janů / Salty Mascara

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.

Valentýna Janů / Salty Mascara

23.05.2018 - 04.08.2018

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

opening: 23. 5. 2018 at 7 pm

curator: Laura Amann

Hello dear,

Feel free to walk in.

Sit down.

Watch.

Let the sun set on your face.

Everything is in transition.

Light becomes dark.

Your core body temperature sinks.

Words create imagery.

Let the sun guide your rhythm.

You realise the table is a chair.

Or was it a bed.

Can you even feel the frictionless surface?

“Your living room is a cinema.”

It is real but also surreal in its dream-like fluidity.

If you feel like it, think about the following…

Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and sunset with peaches Text > Image > Text

We are inclined to assume that images are by nature static and poetry temporal. Are you really sure about this? Isn’t it so, that all media bear traces of other media and therefore are inherently mixed? Maybe it is more interesting to focus on decoding the precise dosages and ingredients of those mixtures? Think about: What is a medium made of? How do we experience it? How does it manifest itself in time and space? Which main sign system does it use?

Maybe the differences do not always lie where we think they lie.

In this sense it is interesting to think about the way we describe an image. Do you visualise or verbalise? Are you static or dynamic in your style? Do you tend to focus on spatial perception, precise localisations, detailed descriptions and use mainly nouns? Or do you focus on temporal expressions, dynamic descriptions, in short the narrative, and lots of motion verbs? Does it make a difference if the image is familiar to you? And what if somebody else had already described the image to you before?

Ultimately it is your choice how to describe and therefore how to see.

One day, I saw the sunset forty-three times Consciousness > Unconsciousness > Consciousness

When we dream, or rather when we remember a dream we operate at the borders of consciousness and at times in the transitions between waking and sleeping. And though typically thought to be passive and unproductive, the worlds that sleep contains and performs are worlds that inform and influence our waking lives. Though we know very little about why we need sleep, we do know it clears toxic metabolic debris, consolidates our memory and helps us learn and reorganise information accumulated while awake.

So if sleep is a productive mode in itself in a different state of consciousness,

Is it possible that the imaginative labour of artistic practice is a form of public dreaming?

Public dreaming, that allows us to enter a liminal state of emotional transference, where we cannot differentiate intimacy from distance, ourselves from the other and familiarity from reality.

A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn Ethics > Aesthetics > Ethics

If aesthetics has everything to do with sensation and perception through bodily feeling, good design has actually made us numb.

The smooth surfaces of modern design are there to eliminate any friction. Good design has become our anaesthetic, allowing us to prolong our liminal state of unconsciousness into waking ours. But good design was not only supposed to look like good design it was also supposed to make us ‘good’, to give us instant virtues. Good design is our antidote.

All good.

But who are we to need this smoothness so badly?

Your story left me with a bitter after-taste…

I hope your make-up is waterproof.

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