Veronika Vlková / Daddy_rough_and _reduced_final_ok

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.

Veronika Vlková / Daddy_rough_and _reduced_final_ok

19.10.2022 - 14.01.2023

Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Marie Štindlová

Opening: 19 October 2022, 7 pm

Mother and son are travelling on foot to Vienna. On the way they cook, wash, look, show each other things. Sometimes it's difficult, their hands are of stone. The steps are verses and the march is a prayer for healthy relationships. Without losing their humour, they are trying to shake off the layers of patriarchal sediment settled on their arms, hearts, family and landscape.

The title of the exhibition Daddy_rough_and_reduced_final_ok refers in its form and structure to the names of documents stored in the digital environment in a number of variants (rough/final, reduced/hd etc.). Video is therefore the central element of the exhibition. The thematization of the medium and its structure (its disruption) is reflected in the way the artist approaches it. She works with ruptures and distortions which she uses to create similar cracks in stereotypical notions of clearly defined gender roles. She explores them both gently and with a mischievous smile. At the same time, however, she looks with utter seriousness for ways of how to heal patriarchy and masculinity in our time.

The film shows the artist and her teenage son navigating a landscape associated with a family and historical trauma. By experiencing the landscape together and performing certain activities, they seek to heal it, as well as themselves. They encode a desire for renewal and transformation into ordinary gestures of survival and care. The process is complicated by the stone structures embedded in their bodies which make quick movements, fine motoric skills and mutual touching impossible. The pilgrims are hoping that with every kilometre they will leave behind a past that may no longer be part of them, that the stones on their hands will turn to clay and water and they will be able to knead them into different shapes: soft, pliable, yet firm.

Cooking their favourite food, mother and son feed the surrounding gorges. Flowers are guides, together with the son they tell the story of the search for his role. The stream bubbles up and washes away everything unnecessary.

Acknowledgement / Collaboration:

Photography: Maria Lopatyuk, Matěj Nytra, Katarina Kadijević

Sound: Jonatan Pastirčák, Tomáš Dvořák, Kateřina Koutná

Costumes: Kristýna Nytrová

Exhibition design: Martin Nytra

Kanikuly march: Lucie Králíková, Hana Kubešová