the little infinity

Marian Palla

 
Matter in Eternity

Habima Fuchs

 
ANONYMOUS FORM OF SQUARE

JIŘÍ HILMAR

 
LOVE LIFE

JIŘÍ THÝN

 
THE SKY SERENE AS A VAST AQUARIUM

NÉPHÉLI BARBAS

 
unconductive trash

Largely Observed

 
Tomáš Hlavina

TLNVXYK Puzzle

 
Filip Dvořák

The Ravine – The Room

 
Jiří Staněk

Brightness

 
Petr Nikl

Wild Flowerbeds

 
Lukáš Jasanský - Martin Polák

Sir's Hunting Ground

 
Lenka Vítková

First book of emblems

 
Inge Kosková

Flow

 
David Možný

Blink of an Eye

 
Kristián Németh

Warm Greetings

 
Jiří Kovanda

Ten Minutes Earlier

 
Karel Adamus

Minimal Metaphors

 
Tomáš Absolon

RAFA MATA

 
František Skála

TWO YEARS' VACATION

 
Olga Karlíková

At Dawn

 
Pavla Sceranková & Dušan Zahoranský

Work on the Future

 
Selection from the Fait Gallery Collection

ECHO

 
Vladimír Kokolia

The Essential Kokolia

 
Alena Kotzmannová & Q:

The Last Footprint / Seconds Before…

 
Nika Kupyrova

No More Mr Nice Guy

 
Markéta Othová

1990–2018

 
Valentýna Janů

Salty Mascara

 
Jan Merta

Return

 
Radek Brousil & Peter Puklus

Stupid

 
Milan Grygar

LIGHT, SOUND, MOTION

 
Svätopluk Mikyta

Ornamentiana

 
Denisa Lehocká

Luno 550

 
Eva Rybářová

KURT HERMES

 
Christian Weidner a Lukas Kaufmann

ERASE/REWIND

 
Markéta Magidová

TERTIUM NON DATUR

 
Tomáš Bárta

EXTERNAL SETUP

 
Václav Stratil

LANDSCAPES

 
Ondřej Kotrč

TOO LATE FOR DARKNESS

 
Kateřina Vincourová

"WHENEVER YOU SAY."

 
Jiří Franta & David Böhm

BLIND MAN’S DREAM

 
Ewa & Jacek Doroszenko

EXERCISES OF LISTENING

 
Jan Poupě

SET OF VIEWS

 
Peter Demek

STATUS

 
Josef Achrer

BACKSTORIES

 
Radek Brousil

HANDS CLASPED

 
Katarína Hládeková and Jiří Kovanda

SIAMESE UNCLE & MONTAGE

 
Jiří Valoch

WORDS

 
František Skála

TRIBAL

 
Jiří Franta and Ondřej Homola

A BLIND MASTER AND A LIMPING MONK

 
Alžběta Bačíková and Martina Smutná

CARPE DIEM

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

THE FRAGMENTS OF SETS / THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

 
Tomáš Absolon

MONET ON MY MIND

 
Kamila Zemková

THE DEAD SPOTS

 
Johana Pošová

WET WET

 
Ivan Pinkava

[ANTROPOLOGY]

 
SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

READY OR NOT, HERE I COME

 
Veronika Vlková & Jan Šrámek

THE SOURCE

 
Jan Brož

SSSSSS

 
ONE MOMENT / PART ONE: PRIVATE COLLECTION FROM BRNO

COLLECTOR'S CYCLE OF IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

 
Alice Nikitinová

IT WOULDN'T BE POINTLESS TO

 
Ondřej Basjuk

THE CULT EXHIBITION

 
Tomáš Bárta

THINGS YOU CAN´T DELETE

 
HE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

FOR MANY DIFFERENT EARS

 
Katarína Hládeková

TO START THE FIRE

 
Marek Meduna

AMONG THE DOG THIEFS

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

WORDS AMONG SHAPES / SHAPES AMONG NAMES

 
Lukas Thaler

THE PROPELLER

 
Krištof Kintera

Hollywoodoo!

 
Ondřej Homola

ARANGE

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION FOCUSED ON THE YOUNGEST GENERATION

TETRADEKAGON

 
Tomáš Bárta

SOFTCORE

 
Richard Stipl

SENSE OF AN END

 
Lubomír Typlt

THEY WON'T ESCAPE FAR

 
Kateřina Vincourová

THE PRESENCE AS
A TRILL

 
SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

OPEN

 
Christian Weidner
/ Vincent Bauer
/ Cornelia Lein

HERE AND
SOMEWHERE
ELSE

 
The selection from the FAIT GALLERY collection

THE SELECTION
FROM THE
COLLECTION

 
Alena Kotzmannová
/ Jan Šerých

A CHI-
LIAGON



Marian Palla / the little infinity

21.02.2024 - 04.05.2024

Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curators: Denisa Kujelová a Vít Havránek

Opening: 21st February, 7 pm

 

To create a picture using earth from a Moravian orchard is to abandon the modernist tradition of expressionism, fauvism, impressionism, and also what preceded them. For someone who doesn't paint every day, such a decision may seem easy. But it isn’t, as both the painter and the picture lose the joy of a brush sweeping across the palette and canvas, as well as the effects conveyed by colour. For curators and the visitors, the earth pictures, one of which gave the exhibition its title, are a gateway to the most extensive display of Marian Palla's work to date. We enter Palla's oeuvre from roughly the centre of its material sediment, literally crashing, like country schoolmasters, into the middle of a giant molehill. Because, in keeping with the artist's programme, this is neither a complete nor a scholarly retrospective but typically, or occasionally, a taxonomic (exploring the species diversity of the artefacts) and random show.

Palla's very first participation in a public presentation of young Brno artists (1971) grabbed the attention of Jiří Valoch, for whom the Nature picture was "something different at first sight".[1]. This event led to their acquaintance and Palla became an active member and a driving force behind the now-legendary[2] Brno circle. His studio in Kotlářská Street provided the space for countless meetings, debates, studio exhibitions and performances by invited guests. The distinctiveness that had enchanted Valoch was not only visible against the backdrop of the conformist art of the time, it also characterised Palla's work within the Brno circle. It centred around two opposites, seriousness resulting from the experience of land art and drawing performances (I existed in this painting for two days and ate 7,799 grains of rice, 24 hours, Journey to a touch, Drawings with tea, etc.), and humour, or more precisely, naivety, constantly present from the earliest paintings (My parents, Nature, etc.).

Palla actually describes himself as a naive conceptualist.[3] The starting point for this conceptualism was not Duchamp nor his idiosyncratic interpreter Kossuth, but rather Magritte's painting This is not a pipe. The language, idea and definition of art around which the interest of Anglo-American conceptual artists gravitates has its roots in Palla’s work in fiction, poetry, and increasingly in Zen spirituality. Humour, naivety, self-criticism, empirical observation, description of obvious facts, absurd questions, paradoxes, the great subjects of the philosophy of life. We find all this condensed in every single one of Palla's poems, objects, pictures which are created because the artist wants to "experience intensely" but at the same time "to do things without purpose". Art and Zen practice mutually intertwine.

The concept of abandoning modernity mentioned in the introduction (with the exception of conceptual art) was employed by the artist to move through the history that far predates it. He could view the manifestations of the zeitgeist and modernity with the hearty kindness of a caveman, and painting with sticks or body parts, Neolithic pottery, imprinting and other prehistoric practices hold a prominent place in his work. Perhaps due to his pre-modern perspective, his work naturally constituted itself from the positions of interspeciesism and radical sustainability topical today. He arrived at it not by reading Bruno Latour but through a concentrated meditation on the reality that surrounds him.

For that matter, even the essay Against Interpretation[4] relevant today draws attention to the simplification (undoubtedly related to conceptual art) committed by art theory when it forgets the qualities that arise in primary sensory perception and assesses the value of an artwork only through interpretation. Sontag notes the "experience of something mystical, magical" that the prehistoric creature had in the Lascaux cave. Palla's conceptualism was aware of the brain's one-sidedness and involved body parts and nature in creating art. Projecting the ideal of enchantment into a remote French cave, as the New York theorist did, was not an option for Palla; in contrast, he demonstrates that it can be experienced by anyone in their surroundings. In his case, also between cities, Brno, a country house with a yard and animals, and cosmic nature.

Note, for example, that the Spoilt picture, Crack and other works by Palla owe their existence to the correction of the insight into the meaning of error; the error of artistic skill or material in the creative process. The consistent concept of doing things without purpose directs the artist not to exclude error, awkwardness, displeasure, or any other option based on the outcome. It grants each variation a potential for intense experience, its own inherent and healing beauty. This may seem a serious error of judgment, a naivety in a society organised around the pragmatic pursuit of success and profit. But once the crack opens, the beauty of error and ruining starts working, as a source of therapy of the imaginary common sense.
 
T: Vít Havránek
 
 
 

[1] VALOCH, Jiří. Marian Palla: Ticho, čekání a dech (kat. výst.). Galerie Na bidýlku, Brno, December 1987.

[2] Let us note here the publications and exhibitions of Barbora Klímová, long-term research of Jana Písaříková and Ondřej Chrobák of the Jiří Valoch Archive in the MG in Brno, the similarly focused research of Helena Musilová, the catalogues of the works of Vladimír Ambroz (Tomáš Pospiszyl), ČS koncept 70. let by Denisa Kujelová (ed.), Akční umění by Pavlína Morganová, etc.

[3] Marian Palla, Naivní konceptualista a slepice,2014.

[4] Susan Sontag, „Against Interpretation." In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 1966.

                                                                                                           


JAKUB HOŠEK / CHAOS IS ORDER NOT YET UNDERSTOOD

-

Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Dominican Square 10, Brno
18. 3. - 30. 4. 2015
Opening: 17. 3. 2015 at 6pm
Curator: Lumír Nykl

 
„Why do so many new abstractions look the same?" - Jerry Saltz, critic and theorist
 
„He is known to absorb all the flyers, album covers, blogs ... and then he gets it all out of himself in the studio" - Jan Lesák, visual artist, photographer
 
„I have already said to Hošek that the most beautiful thing on the exhibition was the radiator." - Karel Císař, theorist and curator
 
„Eight golden rings as if I was Shab-Shabba Ranks" - Darold Ferguson Jr., rapper and singer
 
Chaos is order yet undeciphered" - that is the introducing sentence of Denise Villeneuve’s movie Enemy. This fits very well to the description of the contemporary art and the exhibition of Jakub Hošek.
The compulsive need to find the cipher to his work hangs in a shared gallery climate every time, the fragments of shapes (either texts or pictures), he has impounded, leave the comfort zone of their original carrier. The characters then occupy space stretched beyond the reserved dimensions and levels of meaning.
In the "auteur" movie Enemy Denis Villeneuve develops the idea of ​​Alfred Hitchcock, which touches film and imitation in general - „If you meet your lookalike, you should kill him." The promise of understanding to the well arranged order in a chaotic web of symbols in Enemy is subject to (self-) destructive, (self-) identification of the identical lookalike. In the case of Jakub Hošek this ambiguous relationship can be seen mainly on the level of the key process of transferring carved drawing templates to a canvas otherwise processed as a "painting". As an implication the key drawings give the final object a possibility to be created thanks to their distruction. The free ride on the hanging painting is what makes the three-dimensional object what it is. These characteristics of used techniques and media Jakub Hošek uses as a theme since the time of study at the Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of V. Skrepl and J. Kovanda. The exhibition in the FAIT GALLERY PREVIEW takes place before his residency at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul and subsequent scholarship in Tabačka Kulturfabrik – a cultural center in the eastern Slovakian town of Kosice.
 
In the movie Enemy we do not find out whether both of the lookalikes have a scar in the same place. The order to the chaos of their resemblances is brought by a sore imprint of a ring worn by only one of them.
The understanding is a mutual, time-consuming process compared to the privileged, distant decryption. When you decrypt the object it is subordinate to the colonizing hunter of the meaning. In the act of understanding the viewer and the image have a similar relationship to that seen between drawing and painting in Jakub Hošek’s work, between the flat painting and the three-dimensional object, between a sign and an ornament. As people say: we usually start to understand the text once we stop following it.
The flat hanging painting changes in the three-dimensional box. The cutter is thus connected by a brush stroke. The ring serves as a boxer. Acrylic tattoos the canvas.
The change is possible as long as the term period is replaced by a simple piece of information edited in the social networks.
 
The described characteristics of the Jakub Hošek’s art work explain the meaning of overlaping of the first and the second/the chaos and the order. The assumptions of his work can be compared to a specially conceived process of superimposition - covering of an already existing image by another. Jakub Hošek acknowledges this method by a conscious reference to this word in an otherwise unusual plural - Superimpositions, which is the title of the new album by the experimental electronic producer Lorenzo Senni.
The critic Alexander Iadarola (Quietus, dismagazine, Rhizome) notes Senni‘s sinister aspect of the superimposition. "Whereas with palimpsests one can see the traces of previous writers' markings as they're written the effaced over, with a superimposition there's no trace, no hint of what was before". The area of ​​design and fine arts have already overlaped a long time ago at least in the consensual label of the artwork - "a piece". In the global arts community the term piece is as popular as the term "track" within the club music scene. Piece sounds equally expressive and convincing, especially considering the nature of Hošek‘s images.
 
In the well arranged area of a white showroom a value of one piece corresponds with the value of another one. This isomorphic relationship is also characteristic for objects - forms on the picture - between them. The uniformity also establishes the relationship of the shown forms towards their physical carrier. Of a final piece and the cardboard models, sentenced to the fate of being waste material. The exhibition, understood in the general sense of exposing the objects to human view, actually begins and ends with a gallery shop window, where the residual cardboard represents a sort of preview of the author's main method, metaphorically also a preview of his studio and portfolio. We can remember his exhibition in Ostrava Industrial Gallery in 2013 and the installation solution of adjusting the preparatory drawings on paper to the level of works on canvas. But especially here  resonates his well-known project called Let me rule in Jiří Švestka Gallery, where the studio  chaos was scenographically transferred and copied in the ratio of one to one.
 
Style known from Let me rule dominates even in the (...) previously unrecognised order. Recognisable style that can be conveniently described by the familiar English word creepy.
Parts of cut hands are touching crooked, jagged, almost "crossed" wasters of the original shapes. Swollen and frayed tissue that has lost prosthetic drawing, are chaotically crawling over each other and seeking support in the precisely made and graduated surface. The degrees of the surface are being given to us in one lot and as tightly as barbed wire allows.
The paintings by Jakub Hošek behave like an evil twin and hurt even what is depict.
The quotations do not refer to the source, the cutter works as it should only at the final stopper.
The blending of the shapes is always an intersection at first, no form passes through the another one unscathed.
Hošek‘s often attributed comic abbreviation is associated with the image of the latent immobilisation of animated film sequences, where the chaos of a pair of images is moved to the proper movement by a human agent. He takes on the form of the hands, eyes, or a false frame as a trickish, crippled lookalike. And if he is not destroyed in the logic of Hitchcock’s quoted aphorism, he is trying to move the current viewer to understand and protect him.
  
Against what? Perhaps against the diffusion of the wild culture, ie unframed areas, "which do not have any denotation", as we are informed by the Bourriaudious Daily application. Adverse uncomfortable sensations and our memories jump at us from Jakub Hošek’s picture as spam, and a creepy adware ad:
"Eat this and you will never want to paint again. The doctors call this the cutter for the art. "
 
Lumír Nykl
 

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