Jiří Staněk / Brightness

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.

Jiří Staněk / Brightness

19.10.2022 - 14.01.2023

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Jiří Dušek

Exhibition architecture: Jakub Němec

Opening: 19 October 2022, 7 pm

The Eye, its Brain, our Universe and Jiří Staněk's Wavefronts

Sight is a miraculous organ and clearly the most important human sense. Through it we receive up to eighty percent of information about the world around us. It is an amazing result of evolution which has brought it to near-perfection over tens of millions of years. Its marvellous anatomy, the intricate processing of the captured image, the interaction between the eyes and the brain - we still have only very vague ideas about all this.

Yet the wondrousness of our world goes even further... A stream of visible light, i.e. light which the human eye can perceive, sometimes acts like a staccato of the individual elements and sometimes like a wave, and not only at the level of the imperceptible microworld but also in our own eyes. The passage of light through the cornea, lens and the vitreous body is defined by the laws of geometrical optics. And we know that it only takes a few dozen individual photons to irritate the light-sensitive cells - cones and rods.

We don't know why our eyes get flooded with tears as a result of an emotional outburst. We don't know why nature has endowed us with the sclera that enables us to communicate without words. We don't know why the sensitivity of our eyes - unlike many other living organisms - is so limited. We don't know why and how the human brain can organise so well the chaos our eyes record. We don't actually see reality, the perceived world is not real. Everything is a stream of photons that is somehow interpreted by our brain - everything exists only in our imagination.

Jiří Staněk also took the path of visualization of waves and elements. His grids of paper installations are in fact macroscopic wavefronts that change appearance with the viewing angle of an astonished viewer. On closer inspection, they resemble detailed views of the surface of the Sun. The surface is structured by granulation, i.e. peaks of upward currents several hundred degrees warmer than the surrounding environment, which transfer energy from the inner areas towards the surface.

Thanks to this, the visible part of the Sun is heated to the temperature of five and a half thousand degrees Celsius. Thanks to this, life on planet Earth has been possible for four billion years. Thanks to this, the eye that has hatched from the brains of our ancient ancestors can perceive its own universe. Thanks to the imagination of the artist Jiří Staněk and the visitors, the Brightness exhibition exists.

Go back