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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Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
Opening: 5/4/2012 at 7pm
Curator: Martin Nytra
The motif of the exhibition of Christian Weidner, Vincent Bauer and Cornelia Lein is the source, starting point, complex phenomenon, human being and the basic element of matter in interaction with the world, of which each of them creates their own idea. They influence it and what they receive is constantly being evaluated, depending on situation in which they currently are. In the case of the authors themselves it is mainly self-reflection of their own work and their innate self in an environment of constant changes, stimuli, vague forms and illusions. It is also about a reflection on the nature of communication, originality, free will and sense of time throughout cooperation process. The search for the starting point of a message, the initial situation from which it arose, or the furthest point of the last recorded contact with an object; it is motivated by a desire to recognize and again to experience the taste which faded from memory.
Interaction between subjects is possible under conditions which are typical for most of the forms of cooperation. The instinct to act, intuition and conscious will to speak with the world, leading to specific changes, to the movement and the perception of time in the entire process of action as a confrontation of memory with a concept of future, taking place in a concrete situation of space. Thinking about the future, our desire is being formed; it activates our ability to construct possible scenarios and anticipate the consequences. We are aware of the fact that our speech must be articulated if we want to avoid unwanted circumstances of misunderstanding. All this is connected to the basic problem of the way and form of representation, how to express the content of our message in a way that would be understood by the viewer as well. In the distance communication there is a possible limit: blindness or mutual invisibility of a sender and a recipient. All around us there are lots of messages of unknown origin and in this situation is our ignorance, depending on a situation, extremely unfavorable. Therefore, the anonymity of the author and the unknown identity sending a signal serve as a stimulus of our natural curiosity. But there still remains the question of substance. What is the cause of interaction between world and life within?