Anna Ročnová / Gerbera won't break

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.

Anna Ročnová / Gerbera won't break

22.05.2024 - 27.07.2024

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Lenka Vítková

Opening: 22nd May, 7 pm

LV: I am fascinated by the strange calmness that emanates from your work, the absence of any hint of moralizing. How has working in a flower shop changed your art practice?

AR: It's not a closed process. I was learning the floristry craft and was surprised by how many things I knew from my art work. My things are often infused with what I'm experiencing, for example, I was preparing the exhibition Mown Gooseberry in my late grandmother's house just before it was renovated, the garden was also undergoing a change, so I turned the trees and shrubs that my grandmother liked into objects. It's the same with floristry, I apply florist methods, materials to art and see how it manifests.

LV: In your studio I was really impressed by your respect for everything you handle, including the crude oil that the florist mats are made of, or the dark liquids that prevent decay in floristry. How do you work? Can you describe the process, and what is its goal?

AR: I usually start by surrounding myself with materials. I bring various kinds of wood, leaves, fruits, now I also visit florist shops, skewers, wire, dry materials, etc into the studio, I also work with more traditional sculptural materials, plaster, clay, and I like to use fabric.

I fold, glue and group, fill, cut, melt, dye, sew, burn. I may use an object I made years ago and revive it in a new constellation. The subsequent installation is just as important as the creation of each object. In the installation I create what we often see in nature. I think atmospherically it's the details of the landscape, the forest, and I'm also interested in interfaces, places on the outskirts of the city where wilderness stretches into the city, the edges of pavements, bits of concrete lost amng grass and overgrown bushes in which a colour microtene bag is caught.

I refer to the process of my work as "extended nature". And that is the goal of my work. The result is a whole that looks natural, as if it came into existence and grew by itself, just like it happens in nature. When I exhibit outdoors, the viewer doesn't have to be sure whether they are looking at a work of art or a work of nature.

What I also enjoy about working with naturalia is their emotionality, the process of birth and decline, growth and decay, rotting, drying. All these processes on the surface co-create the emotionality that my objects subsequently exude. Emotion is an important clue for me. And I think it is ultimately emotions that determine what the objects will look like.

LV: You also mentioned the need to set a kind of tension that your objects really hold for me - they make me wonder, they're not easily interpreted. Would you like to say more about that?

AR: I think the tension you're talking about is between the parts that make up my objects. Sometimes I modify them by reinforcing the emotion I want the object to emit, for example, by employing used engine oil, permanganate, or burning. My objects are characterized by fragility, I am interested in destruction which I perceive, like it is in nature, as part of a cycle, not as something catastrophic. But I'm also interested in other situations, like water running down a rock, the depth of observation from larger wholes to the tiniest detail.

LV: Acknowledging the possibility of destruction - for me it is also the acceptance of life and its cycles. But the usual requirement placed on a work of art is that it should be as durable as possible. How much do you think about this, is it a challenge for you?

AR: Actually, I have never asked myself this question during my work. Many objects are very resistant. I tested this when I exhibited outdoors. Some of the objects are still in place today and are gradually growing into their surroundings. Others have not changed their appearance at all after six months of exposure to the elements, and continue to permeate my other installations.

Fragile objects can be adjusted in glass boxes, following the example of natural exhibits. However, when installing and creating objects, I have little interest in the issue of durability and do not emphasize it in my choice of materials.

LV: What obstacles do you have to overcome in your work? Or do the flow and joy prevail?

AR: I really enjoy exploring the possibilities of new connections, the strange energy that is present during the process. Sometimes I can't communicate with the material. Then it helps to take it apart and put it back together again, to be able to touch it and connect with it in some way. I become a part of it and that makes it whole.

Interview with Anna Ročňová (AR) on the exhibition Gerbera Won't Break was led by Lenka Vítková (LV).

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