JIŘÍ THÝN / LOVE LIFE

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 THÝN / LOVE LIFE

25.10.2023 - 13.01.2024

Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Jiří Ptáček

Opening: 25th October, 7 pm

Jiří Thýn (b. 1977) counts among prominent Czech post-conceptual photographers of the middle generation. Over the past twenty years, he has explored the photographic medium and its relationship to other art disciplines: objects, installations, moving images, poetry, drawing and painting. Through these "other media", however, he has always primarily employed photography as a tool that allows him empathetic, emotionally tinged and unavoidably subjective insights into the problems that he sets himself.

Jiří Thýn's works are not only reflections of the photographic medium and its relationship to other art disciplines. In fact, the photographer always strives to open up access to the subjects that he feels are topical and urgent. They are usually of a deeply personal or even existential nature. Through his own and appropriated photographs, he conducts a dialogue with himself, exclusively in the mode of an image that he allows to slip out of the safety net of conceptual thinking, like soap from wet hands. Thýn wants to act through images, since he is aware that this leads to different findings, just like a poet views reality differently from a scientist. Perhaps this is what his experiment with so-called non-narrative photography was intended to lead to in the past; in the experiment he attempted to overcome the situation aspect of photographs through the gestures of their interpretation through abstraction, specifically decontextualizations and various immediate artistic interventions. For him, photography is a true "medium" that stands between the subject and the artist, enabling him or her to combine content and emotional layers into a single artwork.

If we were to find a common denominator of the collection that Jiří Thýn presents for the first time at the exhibition entitled Love Life, it would probably be a pictorial contemplation of the possibility and impossibility of distancing from the situations and events that surround us. Is it possible to move away from the tragedies the visual echoes of which reach us from all sides? Is it possible to ascend to the orbit of the Earth and look at everything that happens on it without bias? Is certain timelessness decent to those who live in the present? Doesn’t it make one an unsympathetic, condescending cynic?

Jiří Thýn's photographs do not give us answers because answers always silence questions. They are actually meditations on images of misfortune, death and destruction, phenomena that do not disappear, even if they take on new forms. The high resolution of the digital images offers a dangerously powerful sensory experience. But can one be dazzled by such images for their extraordinary aesthetic qualities? Or are such images meant to intensify the emotional effect, like the highly expressive and naturalistic depictions of suffering in late Gothic paintings and sculptures? Yet those were meant to turn our ancestors to God. What are these modern images meant to turn us to? The imperative in the title turns into uncertainty. Can you love life in all its manifestations, even the heartless and cruel ones? Is it humanly possible? Can one be ordered to do so? Or can it be strongly recommended? Or is Thýn just whispering these words to himself?

So love life if you can.

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