Jiří Staněk / Brightness

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.

Jiří Staněk / Brightness

19.10.2022 - 14.01.2023

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Jiří Dušek

Exhibition architecture: Jakub Němec

Opening: 19 October 2022, 7 pm

The Eye, its Brain, our Universe and Jiří Staněk's Wavefronts

Sight is a miraculous organ and clearly the most important human sense. Through it we receive up to eighty percent of information about the world around us. It is an amazing result of evolution which has brought it to near-perfection over tens of millions of years. Its marvellous anatomy, the intricate processing of the captured image, the interaction between the eyes and the brain - we still have only very vague ideas about all this.

Yet the wondrousness of our world goes even further... A stream of visible light, i.e. light which the human eye can perceive, sometimes acts like a staccato of the individual elements and sometimes like a wave, and not only at the level of the imperceptible microworld but also in our own eyes. The passage of light through the cornea, lens and the vitreous body is defined by the laws of geometrical optics. And we know that it only takes a few dozen individual photons to irritate the light-sensitive cells - cones and rods.

We don't know why our eyes get flooded with tears as a result of an emotional outburst. We don't know why nature has endowed us with the sclera that enables us to communicate without words. We don't know why the sensitivity of our eyes - unlike many other living organisms - is so limited. We don't know why and how the human brain can organise so well the chaos our eyes record. We don't actually see reality, the perceived world is not real. Everything is a stream of photons that is somehow interpreted by our brain - everything exists only in our imagination.

Jiří Staněk also took the path of visualization of waves and elements. His grids of paper installations are in fact macroscopic wavefronts that change appearance with the viewing angle of an astonished viewer. On closer inspection, they resemble detailed views of the surface of the Sun. The surface is structured by granulation, i.e. peaks of upward currents several hundred degrees warmer than the surrounding environment, which transfer energy from the inner areas towards the surface.

Thanks to this, the visible part of the Sun is heated to the temperature of five and a half thousand degrees Celsius. Thanks to this, life on planet Earth has been possible for four billion years. Thanks to this, the eye that has hatched from the brains of our ancient ancestors can perceive its own universe. Thanks to the imagination of the artist Jiří Staněk and the visitors, the Brightness exhibition exists.

Go back