Lukáš Jasanský - Martin Polák / Sir's Hunting Ground

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.

Lukáš Jasanský - Martin Polák / Sir's Hunting Ground

01.06.2022 - 30.07.2022

Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Pavel Švec

Opening: 1. 6. 2022, 7 pm

“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement, the greatest source of visual beauty, the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.“

David Attenborough

The acclaimed tandem active on the art scene for over three decades is renowned for their photographic cycles characterized by a high degree of realism. In a new series for the Fait Gallery, the work, of Jasanský and Polák including documentary and reportage photography, detailed studies of architecture, striking shots of nature and the Czech landscape as well as bold experiments with colour or fascinating and sophisticated abstract and geometrical compositions, is expanded with another distinctive photographic genre.

Wildlife photography is considered one of the most challenging disciplines of photography. It requires not only technical skills such as selecting the right exposure or precise focus but also a range of other specific skills and experience, for example, the ability to predict the behaviour of animals in their natural habitat or dexterity in hiding, camouflaging and approaching animals unnoticed. This genre also generally places more emphasis on the aesthetic value of the image than, say, journalistic or documentary photography. Animals are most often captured in action, for example fighting, hunting or moving. Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák, who have spent most of their lives in bustling urban agglomerations, set out with a similar ambition. In the current series, they examine the extent to which a given photographic canon can serve as a means of bringing us closer to nature and deepening our ties with its seemingly separate realm.

The essence of any healthy relationship should include the willingness to see things as they are, without expectations and bias, without stylistic pretensions and lofty ideas. And it is in this respect that the photographs of Jasanský and Polák can tell us a lot about the relationship between man and the inhabitants of wild nature. Like in their previous series, however, they do not make any straightforward judgements about the objects of their observation, leaving the meaning of their work largely open to the viewer's interpretation. When Jasanský and Polák enter "Sir's hunting ground," it does not necessarily mean that they leave their own. On the contrary, they remain faithful to their means and intentions. After all, faithfulness has always played a key role in their photographs.

Text: Pavel Švec

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