RICHARD ŠTIPL / SENSE OF AN END

The events that are present in Tomáš Bárta's paintings take place between two spaces and the partition between them. These pictures inevitably set a "backward course" through the history of European painting, all the way back to Leon Battista Alberti’s reflections on the construction of pictorial space which he incorporated into his seminal work De pictura (1435). However, instead of a well-organised renaissance arrangement, Bárta offers us more ambiguous spatial relations and a spectral illusion of the objects inhabiting his paintings, as if architecture produced its own ghosts.

RICHARD ŠTIPL / SENSE OF AN END

21.09.2012 - 27.10.2012

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
21/9 – 27/10/2012
Opening: 20/9/2012 at 7pm
Curator: Petr Vaňous

Richard Stipl’s work is primarily fulfilling of critical relationship to the genre and what it represents. Genres are not viewed from a distance, with no contact, from a safe distance, but to the contrary. The author himself puts on a mask of a genre to be able to play on of the selected roles. The important thing is to get inside the problem, to places where the first moments of narration occur, the first words of narration, to places where the dead matter changes in subjects and bodies, where it can communicate something.

History of art studied the human body literally from all sides. What else is left to exploit from it today? Probably the same thing, but in a different way. It will not be the cult of physicality, titanic strength and health anymore. It will not even be erotic attraction or metaphor of divinity, the healthy spirit in a healthy body. This version is heretically rejected by Stipl and exacerbates physicality in a different direction, toward repulsion. He explores the expressive range of the face. Anywhere from resting state to states of exaltation and aggression. Gesture deforms. It changes the composition of matter, shortens or lengthens physiognomy, caricatures all seriousness, transforming the face into grimace. There is something very conniving here. Transformation of a human into some kind of a puppet, in a silent actor, in a sad clown or a circus clown. The sadness is multiplied when the composition of bold human dummies executes an ugly ritual. When the limbs are being shortened, the viscera are being exposed and there is blood everywhere. Nudity is not attractive. In the case of Richard Stipl, it is scary. The parody of the genre in put into details, not only in gestures. Head devoid of hair and eyebrows has elongated hybrid eyelashes, sometimes even braided into dreadlocks (Stigma). Elsewhere, the author does not hesitate to separate the head and arms and make them into independent totem-like elements (Ruce), or to place on the head of a statue real denture. Naturalism of most statues stems from used materials: wax and surface polychrome. The author seeks by all means to ensure that the statue does not serve the myth. The more it is obvious the evocation of the fact that it’s impossible to escape from the myth and that we still remain its hostages. Its persistent echoes are seeping through everywhere. It only reveals its reverse, dark side. The mere gesture of closed eyes remains forever full of mysteries and secrets.

If this exhibition is called Pocit konce / Sense of an End, then let’s imagine this “end” more like a repetitive and never-ending Promethean ritual. Recurrent pain, followed by recurrent relief. The desire for definitive death that will never be fulfilled. Genre is breaking down on metaphor. The metaphor is not the death of the genre, even if we wished it thousand times. It is impossible to start again from zero.

Petr Vaňous

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