JAN SVOBODA
JASANSKÝ – POLÁK
MICHAL KALHOUS
ALENA KOTZMANNOVÁ
MARIE KRATOCHVÍLOVÁ
MARKÉTA OTHOVÁ
& JIŘÍ KOVANDA

THE OTHER SIDE OF A PHOTOGRAPH

 
As Seen In Their Natural Environment

Jaromír
Novotný

 
A Spectre in the House

Tomáš Bárta

 
Gerbera won't break

Anna Ročňová

 
Interweaving

Michal Škoda

 
the little infinity

Marian Palla

 
Matter in Eternity

Habima Fuchs

 
ANONYMOUS FORM OF SQUARE

JIŘÍ HILMAR

 
LOVE LIFE

JIŘÍ THÝN

 
THE SKY SERENE AS A VAST AQUARIUM

NÉPHÉLI BARBAS

 
unconductive trash

Largely Observed

 
Tomáš Hlavina

TLNVXYK Puzzle

 
Filip Dvořák

The Ravine – The Room

 
Jiří Staněk

Brightness

 
Petr Nikl

Wild Flowerbeds

 
Lukáš Jasanský - Martin Polák

Sir's Hunting Ground

 
Lenka Vítková

First book of emblems

 
Inge Kosková

Flow

 
David Možný

Blink of an Eye

 
Kristián Németh

Warm Greetings

 
Jiří Kovanda

Ten Minutes Earlier

 
Karel Adamus

Minimal Metaphors

 
Tomáš Absolon

RAFA MATA

 
František Skála

TWO YEARS' VACATION

 
Olga Karlíková

At Dawn

 
Pavla Sceranková & Dušan Zahoranský

Work on the Future

 
Selection from the Fait Gallery Collection

ECHO

 
Vladimír Kokolia

The Essential Kokolia

 
Alena Kotzmannová & Q:

The Last Footprint / Seconds Before…

 
Nika Kupyrova

No More Mr Nice Guy

 
Markéta Othová

1990–2018

 
Valentýna Janů

Salty Mascara

 
Jan Merta

Return

 
Radek Brousil & Peter Puklus

Stupid

 
Milan Grygar

LIGHT, SOUND, MOTION

 
Svätopluk Mikyta

Ornamentiana

 
Denisa Lehocká

Luno 550

 
Eva Rybářová

KURT HERMES

 
Christian Weidner a Lukas Kaufmann

ERASE/REWIND

 
Markéta Magidová

TERTIUM NON DATUR

 
Tomáš Bárta

EXTERNAL SETUP

 
Václav Stratil

LANDSCAPES

 
Ondřej Kotrč

TOO LATE FOR DARKNESS

 
Kateřina Vincourová

"WHENEVER YOU SAY."

 
Jiří Franta & David Böhm

BLIND MAN’S DREAM

 
Ewa & Jacek Doroszenko

EXERCISES OF LISTENING

 
Jan Poupě

SET OF VIEWS

 
Peter Demek

STATUS

 
Josef Achrer

BACKSTORIES

 
Radek Brousil

HANDS CLASPED

 
Katarína Hládeková and Jiří Kovanda

SIAMESE UNCLE & MONTAGE

 
Jiří Valoch

WORDS

 
František Skála

TRIBAL

 
Jiří Franta and Ondřej Homola

A BLIND MASTER AND A LIMPING MONK

 
Alžběta Bačíková and Martina Smutná

CARPE DIEM

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

THE FRAGMENTS OF SETS / THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

 
Tomáš Absolon

MONET ON MY MIND

 
Kamila Zemková

THE DEAD SPOTS

 
Johana Pošová

WET WET

 
Ivan Pinkava

[ANTROPOLOGY]

 
SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

READY OR NOT, HERE I COME

 
Veronika Vlková & Jan Šrámek

THE SOURCE

 
Jan Brož

SSSSSS

 
ONE MOMENT / PART ONE: PRIVATE COLLECTION FROM BRNO

COLLECTOR'S CYCLE OF IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

 
Alice Nikitinová

IT WOULDN'T BE POINTLESS TO

 
Ondřej Basjuk

THE CULT EXHIBITION

 
Tomáš Bárta

THINGS YOU CAN´T DELETE

 
HE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

FOR MANY DIFFERENT EARS

 
Katarína Hládeková

TO START THE FIRE

 
Marek Meduna

AMONG THE DOG THIEFS

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

WORDS AMONG SHAPES / SHAPES AMONG NAMES

 
Lukas Thaler

THE PROPELLER

 
Krištof Kintera

Hollywoodoo!

 
Ondřej Homola

ARANGE

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION FOCUSED ON THE YOUNGEST GENERATION

TETRADEKAGON

 
Tomáš Bárta

SOFTCORE

 
Richard Stipl

SENSE OF AN END

 
Lubomír Typlt

THEY WON'T ESCAPE FAR

 
Kateřina Vincourová

THE PRESENCE AS
A TRILL

 
SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

OPEN

 
Christian Weidner
/ Vincent Bauer
/ Cornelia Lein

HERE AND
SOMEWHERE
ELSE

 
The selection from the FAIT GALLERY collection

THE SELECTION
FROM THE
COLLECTION

 
Alena Kotzmannová
/ Jan Šerých

A CHI-
LIAGON



THE OTHER SIDE OF A PHOTOGRAPH

23.10.2024 - 20.12.2024

Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Denisa Kujelová

Opening: 23rd October, 7 pm

 

The artists of the collective exhibition The Other Side of a Photograph share unusual visuality, the consistency of light and the concept of individual photographs that challenge conventions. Selected works by the tandem of Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák, Michal Kalhous, Alena Kotzmannová, Marie Kratochvílová and Markéta Othová, in dialogue with Jan Svoboda's personal approach to photography and Jiří Kovanda's subtle interventions, allow us to glimpse, through their shared sensitivity, the hidden reality of the world in unexpected detail.

 

The selection of analogue, mostly black-and-white photographs seemingly captures what almost all of us see. In many cases, banal and sometimes even unphotogenic situations, often emphasised in a deliberately unprofessional manner to the point of amateur photography, are sometimes embarrassing. However, the mundane in them opens up wide boundaries of beauty that we probably would not have thought of without their help. Susan Sontag descrines it in the chapter The Heroism of Vision: “No one has ever found ugliness through photography. But many have discovered beauty in this way. Except when the camera is used for documentation or as part of a social ritual, what makes people take photographs is a desire to find something beautiful..."[1]

All of the artists, like Jan Svoboda (1934-1990) from the late 1960s, have in various ways transcended the established principles and canons of photography and in their distinctive approach deliberately questioned its supposed message and formal perfection, expanding it with new possibilities of treatment and perception. "The things I do show no artistry. And I want them not to. I want them not to be pretty, to be as ordinary as possible, not to dazzle, not to shock, not to surprise...[2] Just like Svoboda's work, the works of the mentioned artists have never aspired to conform to standard photographic practices, and like him, some of them have also expressed their opposition to the very term photographer. The theorists Pavel Vančát and Jan Freiberg introduced for their broader thinking and grasp of the medium the fitting tem of "nonphotography"[3] referencing the term anti- or non-photography coined by Nancy Foote in 1976 in relation to postmodern photography.[4]

What makes their photographs so similar is their sophisticated work with technical imperfection, the peculiar tonality of the narrow grey scale and often the use of large formats in sharp contrast to the intimacy and apparent banality of the chosen subjects. Like Svoboda, they focus on their immediate surroundings such as the environment of their homes and the ordinary objects with which we share our private space. In a photograph constructed as an autonomous surface, the role of light in its reflection and absorption is essential, and so is the relationship between objects and their background, with its demarcation often so subtle that the two planes almost merge. This is of course enhanced by the narrow tonality of grey in the choice of black-and-white photography: "Since black-and-white configurations are theoretical, they cannot really exist in the world. But black-and-white photographs do exist. They are in fact the images of the conceptions of the theory of optics, which means that they arose from this theory. [...] Therein lies their strange beauty, identical to the beauty of the conceptual universe. This is why many photographers prefer black-and-white photographs as they reveal more clearly the true meaning of photography, i.e. the world of conceptios."[5]

In regard to the legacy of Jan Svoboda and his exceptional sensitivity, the exhibition shows selected photographs from the broader oeuvres of the individual artists in which forms and procedures more or less referring to Svoboda's work can be recognized. Due to the very narrow theme scope of the exhibition concept, images from various cycles and in some cases diptychs have been selected in collaboration with the artists, and it should be noted that their meaning, which was established in the original context through the composition of their units, has been altered for this specific event.



[1] SONTAG, Susan. O fotografii. Brno, Praha a Litomyšl: Barrister & Principal a Paseka, p. 80.

[2] OTHOVÁ, Markéta; CÍSAŘ, Karel; JANÍČKOVÁ, Adéla, a NOVOTNÝ, Michal. Markéta Othová: již brzy. V Praze: Národní galerie, 2022, p. 7.

[3] VANČÁT, Pavel, a FREIBERG, Jan (eds.). Fotografie?? / Photography?? (exh. cat.). Klatovy: Galerie Klatovy / Klenová, 2004.

[4] FOOTE, Nancy. The Anti-Photographers. Artforum, September 1976, year 15, no. 1., pp. 46–54. Also here:

Douglas FOGLE (ed.). The Last Picture Show. Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982 (exh. cat.). Minneapolis: Walker Art Center 2003, pp. 24–31.

[5] FLUSSER, Vilém. Za filosofii fotografie. Prague: Fra, 2013, pp. 48–49.

                                                                                                                


Vladimír Kokolia / The Essential Kokolia

-

Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Opening: 17. 10. 2018 at 19:00

Curator: Miroslav Ambroz

 

To see nothing

For Vladimír Kokolia painting is an opportunity to reach things that one wouldn’t be able to get at well enough in any other way. Kokolia is the type of painter who wants to really see his subject.

Seeing

It might seem that Kokolia wants to be considered primarily as an impressionist, in the original derogatory sense of the term. He deliberately aims for the impossible: to be, as was quipped about Monet, “only an eye”. He does not, however, believe in a prepared innocent gaze — that would be a great affectation — but relies on an acceptance of the full torrent of visual sensations, or direct visual waste, when one doesn’t have the tools (and perhaps not even a reason) to distinguish illusion from the “overwhelming disorder of the real world”.[1]  He quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to this kind of view of the ordinary world is the knowledge about seen things that one carries in one’s head. Even the names of things are disruptive for the naked eye. Kokolia declares that information inhibits the image.

Seeing the seeing

Nonetheless, a painter wants to “see this seeing”. When seeing, how does a person notice that they are looking? According to Kokolia, this can happen only when we sacrifice meaning and simply let our view float. “I have the distinct impression that precisely such blank looking is the default setting of our vision. It is the most fundamental state, the ‘container’, the womb, the landscape, the pilot frequency, the Tao of seeing, only on account of which individual forms arise”, adds Kokolia.[2]  He believes that a lack of information brings astonishment. Truly, a lack of information? We know, after all, how James Joyce’s characters marvel at a sudden recognition of very fragile and evanescent moments, when a character experiences a sudden revelation about the “whatness” of a thing.

Similarly, for the nameless heroes in the hundreds of drawings from Kokolia’s Big Cycle, the inescapable mechanism of their actions is suddenly revealed to them at a single moment. Here, the vehicle of wonderment is an unexpected recognition of meaning. However, wonderment that is purely visual in origin is, in contrast to narrative epiphany, lacking in substance. The one who is experiencing wonderment just stares and does not actually know anything. Here, the intensity of not knowing shows the depth of wonder. It is as if the one in wonderment sees only one thing, so emptied that it can be considered null. For Kokolia, an example of such views momentarily without content are the squares and rectangles in Mondrian’s paintings. Here, they also have roots in Kokolia’s individualistic theory about cubism and in his thinking about the picture plane and “paintings within a painting”. For Kokolia, the view gradually became an independent entity in which it is possible to study only the visible content and to eliminate for the given moment both the observer and the observed thing.

Painting seeing

Why would the one in wonderment even paint at all? Isn’t it enough just to have the experience? A painter’s embodiment of what is seen is a passage from one world to another, and what was true in one world is not necessarily true in the other one. It is a completely new situation that presumes “the picture has the logical form of representation in common with what it pictures”. [3] A painting may be able to adapt to the form of depiction, but it also has its own special demands as a physical object covered with paint as well as an object with the aim of controlling how the viewer will see it. It must remain adequate, even if it has done away with the function of depiction. The same brushstroke is both a physical trace and also creates the ideal of an image that arises only with the viewer’s gaze.

Kokolia describes the realisation he had in the Hermitage Museum in 1980 while standing before one of Matisse’s paintings: “... something tells me that this is the genuine space, not the three dimensions out there; at the same time, it really and truly is on the surface, literally just oil paints on a canvas. I am looking directly at the union of the greatest abstraction and the greatest materiality…”[4]  For Kokolia, the idea of transferring images across different worlds might have its origin in printmaking. He has dedicated himself to this medium for almost as long as he has to painting (originally to be able to disseminate his drawings under the previous regime, when copy machines were under supervision). Since 1992 he has led the Studio of Experimental Graphics at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. The themes of a matrix, an imprint and a reversal of the image appear repeatedly in his written musings. He similarly incorporates his experience with Tai Chi in his painting. Both of his Chinese teachers, Gene Chen and Zhu Jiancai, taught Tai Chi to him in a completely matter-of-fact manner, without a pseudo-spiritual overlay, and Kokolia likewise leads his brushstrokes with a consideration for the precise transfer of strength.       

Seeing painting

The concentration on direct, unprejudiced seeing and effort to see seeing was followed by the materialization of seeing in an artefact. Apart from this, Kokolia certainly does not underestimate the special moment when a viewer turns up in front of a picture. This is confirmed by the fact that at his exhibitions he examines in detail the distance between the viewer and the picture, their movement around it, viewing angles and orientation of the view, as well as the time spent before the picture.

For the sake of interaction, Kokolia occasionally resorts to popular or “discredited” forms. He styled one of his shows as a commercial sale in the course of which he lived, cooked and worked in the gallery. Another time he displayed “healing pictures” to which visitors were to “expose themselves”.

These and other strategies sought to provide viewers with sufficient time in front of pictures. Kokolia believes that the spent time itself causes that the mode of perception switches from a simple registration of visual information to abidance in a field of vision. The viewer, at least for a while, does not perceive a picture as a separate object, and the distance in the field of vision disappears. This situation can be generated, for example, by the induction of afterimages on the retina or by a view into the visual space of autostereoscopic pictures, as manifested by some of Kokolia’s exhibitions.

The image-in-itself

In interviews and texts, Kokolia speaks ironically about such common and seemingly problem-free terms as “communication”, “opinion” and “expression”. And he doesn’t even have the word “art” in his lexicon. So, if he isn’t just taking a position, what would he offer instead? I suspect that Kokolia has own sect (of which he is the only member) that believes in the “image-in-itself”. Meaning that images exist, even if they are independent of observation. Even if nobody has seen them yet. Perhaps it is this belief that helps him not to be perilously captive to changes in the contemporary context.

[1] Borges, Jorge Luis, The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges, p. 209
[2] Kokolia Vladimír, Úžas, habilitační přednáška, 1996, Akademie výtvarných umění
[3] Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus logico-philosophicus 2.2
[4] S.M. Blumfeld, Prozření Vladimíra Kokolii, Vokno monthly, 1993, no. 27
 

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