Nika Kupyrova / No More Mr Nice Guy

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.

Nika Kupyrova / No More Mr Nice Guy

17.10.2018 - 12.01.2019

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Opening: 17. 10. 2018 at 19:00

Curator: Václav Janoščík

Art projects by Nika Kupyrova don’t have a unifying or stable meaning; instead, they open before us an opulent universe of materials, objects, references and languages.

At the current exhibition the artist makes use of a series of sci-fi novels by Iain M. Banks taking place in a futuristic civilisation known as The Culture, and of his symbolic or ironic names of starships that are in fact living creatures. We can observe works and objects that use their names as a process of creation, control and manipulation of meaning and sense. The artist draws us into suspense between the comprehensible and the unclear, an object and an artefact, the human and the extraterrestrial, between signs and surfaces, truth and fiction, the present and the future.

Such is the role of aesthetics, from Immanuel Kant to Iain M. Banks. We must constantly change and find new forms and languages enabling us to see more than just these dichotomies; we might discover affects and details deeper under the surface of phrases and ideas - and possibly also beauty.

"Serious Callers Only"

I am Václav and you, you are called Nika. When I was little I was quite dissatisfied with my own name; it seemed too conservative. The Czech national patron is Václav and so are the two Czech presidents after 1989.

My name is exclusively used in the Czech cultural context and is basically impossible to pronounce or substitute in other languages. And your name – Nika – immediately brings up an association with Eastern Europe to me.

We are all being called callers, but we ourselves are the callers. We use names to comprehend the world, we cover things up with words to create or solidify their meaning.

“No More Mr Nice Guy”

The problems get even deeper if you come to be labeled not only by you real name but a nickname or a metaphorical expression. Let’s say you are being called “Mr Nice Guy”.

In folk psychology and these self-help manuals this stands for being overly helpful and positive, always trying to avoid conflict and resorting to a compromise or a consensus.

"Kiss My Ass"

Sounds pretty fine at first, but involves a lifelong problem, believe me. While we usually accept the whole idea of democracy rooted in tolerance and in seeking consensus, sometimes you have to decide for yourself.

Sometimes you must simply step out and act against the odds. Sometimes you might need to swear and tell to "kiss my ass". I mean – so much for subtlety. Sometimes you must fight for your name.

"So Much For Subtlety"

Don’t worry, I don’t mean to imply any sort of chauvinism, machoism, egoism, resentment or indifference. The opposite is the case. Even if we fight [fait] for emancipation, for feminism and equal rights, we should take names seriously.

E-mancipare – means “to step out” in Latin. You see – no more Mr Nice Guy. It means to use your voice and claim your own name, a banner to fight with. So don’t worry – of course we still love you.

"Of Course I Still Love You"

Speaking of love. I always have this restless feeling. Sometimes I cannot help but simply love you. To crave your presence, words and sometimes even touches.

And I wake up. Still called the same. And I have to confront this limit to my aspiration in life, with my civil and somehow boring name. An awkward fact or a situation I would like to disregard.

“A True Disregard For Awkward Facts"

This is the game we call naming. Yes, indeed – giving a name can be a thrilling, lavish procedure. It might not just give you an account of what or who someone is. It might also trigger a narrative, a perspective; a joke, pun or a twist.

Frankly speaking, and finally explaining our little game with names – we refer to Iain M. Banks and his series of sci-fi novels based in The Culture. Where every piece of spacecraft is an actual sentient being, endowed with their own witty name.

"Nervous Energy"

The point being – it’s not just about us; it’s not just the fucking humans who matter. It’s the animals, the fictions, the world itself or a spaceship that can be brought to life, soaked with meaning and endowed with a name.

Paradoxically enough this super-anthropocentric phenomenon of giving names can present a process through which we do away with human self-centeredness. A process through which we are getting closer to the nervous energy of art and things.

Go back