Habima Fuchs / Matter in Eternity

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.

Habima Fuchs / Matter in Eternity

21.02.2024 - 04.05.2024

Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Šimon Kadlčák

Opening: 21st February, 7 pm

The whirling eruptions of energy discharges created matter by combining particles, the matter grew in volume and increased in size, filled space and started to produce shapes. Shapes of all forms and sizes were created which continued to change over time. Some shapes appeared unusually unstable, ephemeral and fleeting compared to others, while others in contrast appeared static and unchanging. The truth was, however, that there were also forms compared to which the ephemeral ones seemed stable, and also those compared to which the apparently static ones seemed to be in constant motion. Humans were among the forms that manifested in the course of this process (sometimes it is incorrectly said that it was at the end of it). Like everything else, they were created by stardust, elements ejected from star nuclei coalescing into larger wholes, an expression of a cosmic consciousness that started to explore itself. It seems that conscious matter (or materialized consciousness) predominantly perceives the surrounding world through contact with other matter. Where there is contact, mutual acquainting starts. Matter both reflects and emits light. Since matter and energy are the same,^{^[1]},light has become an extended tentacle of conscious matter. It is no longer necessary to touch directly to perceive, touching can be done at a distance.

Habima Fuchs, matter exploring itself, brings into the light-flooded hall of the Fait Gallery MEM objects, arranges them, divides the space with them, places them into correlations and balances them in a concentrated manner. For her, the exhibition is an opportunity to temporarily pause and fixate the current phase of her personal exploration of the world, as well as to present a fragmentary section of it to others in the form of a spatial record. The exhibition is a moment inviting a break from the usual work routine of kneading matter into shapes full of symbolic meanings, a possibility of reflection and sharing with others. The imagery of Habima Fuchs's works abounds in distinct motifs and associations which she presents to others for free confrontation with their own contexts and subsequent interpretation. In doing so, she trusts in mutual understanding. The roots of the images she works with grow out of the shared mycelium of a "collective information archive": its conscious levels consist of the accumulations of the experience of many generations of human life passed down over millennia in the form of images, books, thoughts and feelings..., and the unconscious ones in turn involve the billions of years of experience of organic life (in forms that people can always recognise but which, given their means of communication, they are only able to express through paraphrasing).

The artist’s current constellation is typified by the geometrical division of a particular space, airiness, leaving room for exploring space through movement, as well as for interpretation. The individually positioned elements create "neural nodes", local clusters of artefacts that determine the final possibilities of the audience's movement through the space. It is the relations of objects in space and its boundaries that enable us to become aware of it and experience it. However, if we want to move through space, we must always make use of its empty sections, avoiding obstacles, bypassing matter. This may remind us of the often neglected and not easily imagined fact that all matter chiefly contains empty space.^{^[2]} It is only the invisible interconnections, the energy interactions between them, that create the ultimate illusion of solidity and stability. The reality, however, is movement, constant rearrangement, processes of birth and decline, renewal and growth.

On a personal level, for Habima Fuchs organizing an exhibition is an opportunity to materialize, or visually invoke, an affirmation for (re?)establishing balance in no less than a cosmic sense. Balance implies symmetry, and symmetry implies a balanced symbiosis of birth and decline, a unity manifested in two ways. This is the principle of eternity, and we are matter, i.e. energy that rearranges itself, at one time it is this and at another time it is that, sometimes it is "big" and sometimes it is "small", sometimes its transformation lasts long and at other times it is hectic in nature, and despite the illusion of exclusive individual existence, only reciprocity (consisting of unique elements) is the continuous interconnection of everything in the spatial and temporal sense, of what we understand as “the world”.

^{^[1]} According to the equation E=MC².

^{^[2]} To be precise, it is 99.9999999999996 % of empty space compared to the proportion of matter constituting an atom.

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