NÉPHÉLI BARBAS / THE SKY SERENE AS A VAST AQUARIUM

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.

NÉPHÉLI BARBAS / THE SKY SERENE AS A VAST AQUARIUM

25.10.2023 - 13.01.2024

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Eva Slabá

Opening: 25th October, 7 pm

In her most recent body of work, Néphéli Barbas explores the everyday metropolitan experience by recording small details such as rain-soaked bus stops, the reflections of mirrors in bars and glass arcades. In this way, she reveals her fascination with contemporary cities as she captures the complex interplay of different historical layers that occurs in these places. Her small, meticulous drawings replicate the verticality of large cities, while her installations in metal and coloured glass present a serene alternative to the usually bustling and ever-changing urban environment.

The latest series of works by the French artist of Greek origin, Néphéli Barbas, is based on her long-term wanderings through the urban environment. Although these are personal captures of the flickering reflections of bus stops after rain, mirrored bars, glass-roofed arcades and fishmongers, Barbas succeeds in sensitively interpreting the shared everyday of metropolises. Through the artist's tracing, we therefore find places that are difficult to pinpoint on a map, places whose signs and structures are similar. Just as Italo Calvino, in his Invisible Cities^{^[1]} shows that each person carries in his mind a city that consists only of differences, a city without shapes and a certain form that real cities complete, so Barbas shows through her works how Prague can be Paris or Brussels Buenos Aires. In Calvino's words, it is precisely a kind of fascination with the timelessness and magic of contemporary cities; a fascination with the layering of different cultural or architectural expressions and styles at different points in human history that surfaces.

In addition to Calvino and his atlas of lost cities, Walter Benjamin can also be seen as the compiler of a "magical encyclopaedia".^{^[2]} Benjamin defined the metropolis through a "new" (non-theoretical) way of writing about civilization in his unfinished work, The Arcade Project (Das Passagen-Werk)^{^[3]}, a montage of textual fragments drawn from the past and its contemporary present, which Didi-Huberman called an anthropological topography of the city.^{^[4]} As the title of the collection of texts suggests, Benjamin was fascinated by (among other things) arcades and passages in which the streets merge with the interior. He thought of them as interior boulevards, assemblages of places, figures and objects where the repetitive and unexpected intermingle, paused dialectical images in which the past kaleidoscopically collides with the living multilayeredness of the big city. In the arcades, people can indulge in activities under an undisturbed sky, in a miniature world of their own without the intervention of the elements. The fascination with this type of environment can also be found in a certain type of flâneurism inherent in Barbas' work.

The above aspect is evident upon closer examination of the themes of the drawings, which combine three key elements: the first is always the space of modernity, the second is the collision of different temporal planes within this space, and the third is the finding of liminality, expressed through a reflective surface such as glass or a mirror. Whether it is the aforementioned bar where the "baroque" stucco ceiling and columns meet a plasma screen, the wooden neo-Gothic doorman with a security camera, or the self-portrait in the Art Nouveau passage. The Néphéli Barbas exhibition can be understood as a travelogue of ambivalent places floating in limbo; an attempt to excursion into the memory of a space that becomes the central narrator of a story. Tiny, meticulously executed coloured drawings on paper are adjusted in structurally sophisticated installations at the intersection of object and exhibition architecture. On the one hand, we encounter bent metal frames, on the other, stained glass display cases, both distantly adopting the nomenclature of mid-century modernism.

The choice of materials is not accidental for the artist - the particular attention represented on paper by the aspect of the reflection of light, the permeation of views and reflections that the artist seeks to anchor in her walks is accentuated beyond the surface of the painting through the properties of the metal and glass spatial installations. The direct lived experience of the verticality of the contemporary city is ultimately inscribed in the format of the small works themselves, whose inhabitants are often abandoned, left to their own introspection or work, lost in the busy collective gaze of public places. Yet even these places often end up seeking private corners in spaces characterized by their permeability and transparency. By depicting fleeting moments, a mixture of experiences, impressions and insights, the artist ensures their permanence and defends against their and her own oblivion, "... because the city and the sky never remain the same."^{^[5]}

^{^[1]} Italo Calvino,Neviditelná města, Prague 1986.

^{^[2]} JM Coetzee, The Man Who Went Shopping for Truth, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/20/history.society, searched 23.

^{^[3]} Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge 1999.

^{^[4]} Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna: esej o spadlé draperii, Prague 2009, pp. 68–70.

^{^[5]} Italo Calvino, Neviditelná města, Prague 1986, p. 124.

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