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.
[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.
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The director JJ Abrams apologised shortly after the premiere of the movie Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) to the fans for over-using the special effect that simulates an optical phenomenon called a "lens flare". At the same time he announced that he will get to remove them from some scenes. "But I'll tell you, there are times when I'm working on a shot, I think, 'Oh this would be really cool... with a lens flare." Matěj Smetana used the same phenomenon occurring in the refraction of light in the objective lens, sometimes considered as a defect, but also frequently added to films and photographs as a feature of "amateur shots" and captured it in a physical form. When hanging in the free space above the ground it seems to be simulating the situation where this phenomenon does not occur in the recording of the camera, but in the human eye.
Smetana, of course, is not interested in creating a mirage. He wanted to materialise the optical experience through technology. He has also based other works on the same principles. He photographed a bee so that the reflections of light on the camera lens formed hexagonal honeycomb shapes. He chopped vegetables in a way that the cut pieces suggested rotation and geometrical cuts through a virtual object in a program for 3D modeling. He turned the reflection of trees on water by using a magnifying glass, so the trees are no longer facing down, but are turned along the horizontal axis.
The optical equipment and visual technology expands our sensory experience. They do not stand outside of our physiological reality, it is not "us and the machines", but they are a part of our subconscious that started, all be it a long time ago, our transformation into cyborgs. It is increasingly more difficult (and not only at the level of sensory perception)to find the boundary between organic and synthetic. But Smetana, as a visual artist, is searching for visual metaphors for this development. He asks a man to record the stroboscope flashes. Therefore giving to the machine (similarly as to a puppet at some other thing) human impulses and then he thinks whether this exchange will have any effect on their reception.