Minami Nishinaga / I’ll give brownie points to something like Čert 180 g, Loupák pes 60 g, or perhaps Bez omáčky

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.

Minami Nishinaga / I’ll give brownie points to something like Čert 180 g, Loupák pes 60 g, or perhaps Bez omáčky

26.02.2020 - 25.07.2020

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Opening: 26 February 2020 at 7pm

Curator: Tímea Vitázková

We are exploring the world to know how it works by just as like peeling Baumkuchen layer by layer.

There I wish the world is surrounded by moments to know small surprising facts which shake our understanding of the world a bit but not to the extent to completely change the structure.

… like when I came to know that couscous is a type of pasta.
Minami Nishinaga
 
Čert 180 g is a type of bread, which you can find on St. Nicolaus day in Tesco, Loupák pes 60g in Albert. Although these products are on offer in self-service checkouts, there is no real chance to buy them. Mirroring this situation, “bez omáčky” is most likely an option, that you can choose from while ordering fries from the same type of self-checkouts, but this wish may not be granted. Sometimes we are offered things by the system, which we cannot choose from, another time for a change we can choose things, which will not be allowed by the system. These are outwardly insignificant and easily overlooked objects and situations. We stop and think about it for a while and then we continue on with life, or we don’t pay attention to them at all.
 
Nonetheless, Minami Nishinaga with her daily obsession and sensitivity towards detail, pays attention to those situations, appreciates them and thus transforms them into her works. The essence of her work results in mostly objects and miniature sculptures, often having performative or audiovisual overlap. One of the main themes, which the artist deals with, is language. At the beginning, the author of Japanese descent perceived the Czech language as very difficult, even
inaccessible. She managed to get acquainted with the language only after getting to know the diminutives. These peculiar words, which contain a kind of mercy are also a sign of proximity between the subjects of communication, became a source of fascination for the artist. Minami Nishinaga became a collector of these phrases, the inventor of her imaginary vocabulary, looking for and assigning local equivalents to the diminutives of her native language. These diminutives
are the bearers of proximity but especially their cuteness - and it winds throughout the artist's work, which is also manifested at the exhibition in the Fait Gallery.
 
I’ll give brownie points to something like Čert 180 g, Loupák pes 60 g, or perhaps Bez omáčky visualises personal stories of eight anthropomorphic objects from different materials. These subtle narrative pieces capture a tiny murmur between objects and subjects. At first sight, these dialogues are not clear however, thanks to the author’s sensitivity and imagination they speak to us and are waiting for empathy, recognition and attention. It is subtle in personifications of zoomorphic works or objects, which are addressed with humanity and care. Other works are related to the artist herself, her "ritual" or situations, full of intimacy and are reflecting the search for support. Throughout these subtle poetic objects, Minami Nishinaga encourages sensitivity, receptive understanding and appreciation of not only your surroundings but also to you personally.

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