Filip Dvořák / The Ravine – The Room

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.

Filip Dvořák / The Ravine – The Room

22.02.2023 - 06.05.2023

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Michal Stolárik

Opening: February 22, 2023

The hole that wasn't there and now it is.

Filip Dvořák is a member of the young generation of Czech visual artists and his multimedia work naturally moves from the expanded character of painting and easel paintings through objects and installations to work with video and text. The fluid handwriting of his works stems from the wide scope of the artist's inspiration - Dvořák is fascinated by history, historical ornaments, nature and natural phenomena, speculative fictions and materials with their symbolic meanings. In his post-conceptual thinking we observe a deliberate form reduction and purity of craftsmanship in contrast to a strong emotional charge with a tendency towards a melancholic spectrum of feelings of transience, hope and expectation. He works in cycles, varying forms and motifs, searching for ideal versions and compositions.

The world is a ravine and the ravine is a world.

The solo exhibition The Ravine - The Room is a follow-up to Dvořák's Strž [Ravine] series with which he has been developing a short story of the same title since 2020. In this concise text, he describes the reality of a community living in a ravine that was created after an unexpected landslide. The hopes and aspirations of the inhabitants living in a confined space focus on the longed-for moment when the tree they look after together grows to such a height that they will be able to leave their home ravine and experience the reality of the world "up there". Like any heterogeneous community, they do not agree on everything. Attempts at dialogue are impossible in places, and views of the world obviously differ.

Dvořák's fiction abounds in symbolism, faith and hope, patience and expectation. The Ravine fable is a simple and easy-to-understand fantasy whose strength, impact and imagery lie in the reduction of the content, repetitions and historicizing lyricism. It is fully comprehensible in the textual version, yet it is the imaginative and fictional artefacts that create a deceptive sense of the existence of a parallel reality.

But there must be something there, surely.

There must be more.

The exhibition presentations of the imaginary world (Strž, 2020, Luxfer Gallery, Česká Skalice; Ravine Culture, 2021, Berlínskej model, Prague; Ve strži a jiné příběhy, 2022, GAVU, Cheb) are typified by an eclectic form through which Dvořák communicates the idea that the works have been produced by different artists. Past exhibition units consisted of traditionally rendered landscape paintings with romanticized views of a ravine, or objects and paintings depicting a tree as a symbol of growing hope. The handwriting of the works varied but they shared an interest in the reality of a different world.

In the current exhibition environment, Dvořák changes focus from macro to micro and centres, among other things, on fragments from one room of an unknown protagonist. Most of them are hanging objects - manipulated wooden tiles with hammered copper details. The individual parts of the Ravine are introduced by fictitious ready-mades and museum reconstructions of once presumably functional objects. The original form eclecticism becomes homogenized, referring at first glance to familiar historicizing forms and signs. We witness the gradual abandoning of ornament in favour of rigid geometry and quadratic patterns, elements of modernist architecture and design - somewhere between Josef Hoffmann, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and art nouveau. In combination with futuristic and at times dystopian speculation, the aesthetics of old museums or pseudo-educational elements, Dvořák explains the details and further develops the existence of the ravine community.

But maybe next spring, maybe next year

the branches will reach so close to the upper edge

that it will only take one small leap.

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