Filip Dvořák / The Ravine – The Room

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.

Filip Dvořák / The Ravine – The Room

22.02.2023 - 06.05.2023

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Michal Stolárik

Opening: February 22, 2023

The hole that wasn't there and now it is.

Filip Dvořák is a member of the young generation of Czech visual artists and his multimedia work naturally moves from the expanded character of painting and easel paintings through objects and installations to work with video and text. The fluid handwriting of his works stems from the wide scope of the artist's inspiration - Dvořák is fascinated by history, historical ornaments, nature and natural phenomena, speculative fictions and materials with their symbolic meanings. In his post-conceptual thinking we observe a deliberate form reduction and purity of craftsmanship in contrast to a strong emotional charge with a tendency towards a melancholic spectrum of feelings of transience, hope and expectation. He works in cycles, varying forms and motifs, searching for ideal versions and compositions.

The world is a ravine and the ravine is a world.

The solo exhibition The Ravine - The Room is a follow-up to Dvořák's Strž [Ravine] series with which he has been developing a short story of the same title since 2020. In this concise text, he describes the reality of a community living in a ravine that was created after an unexpected landslide. The hopes and aspirations of the inhabitants living in a confined space focus on the longed-for moment when the tree they look after together grows to such a height that they will be able to leave their home ravine and experience the reality of the world "up there". Like any heterogeneous community, they do not agree on everything. Attempts at dialogue are impossible in places, and views of the world obviously differ.

Dvořák's fiction abounds in symbolism, faith and hope, patience and expectation. The Ravine fable is a simple and easy-to-understand fantasy whose strength, impact and imagery lie in the reduction of the content, repetitions and historicizing lyricism. It is fully comprehensible in the textual version, yet it is the imaginative and fictional artefacts that create a deceptive sense of the existence of a parallel reality.

But there must be something there, surely.

There must be more.

The exhibition presentations of the imaginary world (Strž, 2020, Luxfer Gallery, Česká Skalice; Ravine Culture, 2021, Berlínskej model, Prague; Ve strži a jiné příběhy, 2022, GAVU, Cheb) are typified by an eclectic form through which Dvořák communicates the idea that the works have been produced by different artists. Past exhibition units consisted of traditionally rendered landscape paintings with romanticized views of a ravine, or objects and paintings depicting a tree as a symbol of growing hope. The handwriting of the works varied but they shared an interest in the reality of a different world.

In the current exhibition environment, Dvořák changes focus from macro to micro and centres, among other things, on fragments from one room of an unknown protagonist. Most of them are hanging objects - manipulated wooden tiles with hammered copper details. The individual parts of the Ravine are introduced by fictitious ready-mades and museum reconstructions of once presumably functional objects. The original form eclecticism becomes homogenized, referring at first glance to familiar historicizing forms and signs. We witness the gradual abandoning of ornament in favour of rigid geometry and quadratic patterns, elements of modernist architecture and design - somewhere between Josef Hoffmann, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and art nouveau. In combination with futuristic and at times dystopian speculation, the aesthetics of old museums or pseudo-educational elements, Dvořák explains the details and further develops the existence of the ravine community.

But maybe next spring, maybe next year

the branches will reach so close to the upper edge

that it will only take one small leap.

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