06.05.2024
Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curator: Jiří Ptáček
Opening: 22nd May, 7 pm
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.
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Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Dominican Square 10, Brno
29/5 – 13/9/2013
Opening: 28/05/2013 at 6pm
Curator: Tomáš Pospěch
Congratulations on your newly born fruit. Vendula Knopová takes the aesthetics of humor to the line of embarrassment. She returns us to what we used to find funny, but that was overwritten by adulthood. She arranges staged slapstick humour, makes it present - sometimes through a picture, sometimes through text. Anyway, the need to come across as not serious, the need to make fun out of her own serious effort has always been Vendula’s characteristic. It would seem that you can find plenty of similar cartoon jokes on the web, so why to carry coal to Karvina. Personally, I was attracted to these pictures rather because of intuited layers behind the surface of the photographs. I imagine how Vendula uncovers memories of children's games, she hunts in a parallel world of their baby sisters, solemnly carries the archeology of childhood, to dig out fun. She rediscovers the world of special orders or only the statements from the adult world, all of which are in the minds of children becoming just ridiculous rhetoric, lacking any sense. Vendula‘s photographs illustrate this bizarre thing, children discovering different structures, how to relate to the outside world and social conventions.
When we are talking about photography, we should specify what we mean. Photography is a very diverse range of strategies, as if it were a variety of media. We can hardly interpret the photographs by Vendula Knopová using quotes from Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and John Berger, whose thoughts are referenced on any photographic exhibitions here. Although in this project Vendula borrows from many different sources - from photo blogs, humor of her younger sisters, childhood memories or traditions of Czech jokes - the important thing is how she manages to weave this diverse material into an exhibition as a relationship between picture, text and space. Girly whispering on the bench at the village bus stop, pictures doodled on the walls of school toilets, wisecracks stated over dirty pub tables are changing here in strange aesthetics mixed from memories, banalities and awkwardness.
We usually do not cry in front of a painting, and mostly do not laugh either. Usually we stay at a much finer scale in between. And why not. But Vendula tries to pass at least some of the emotions on to us, a weird blend of humor, uncertainty and perhaps even embarrassment. She serves them to us as something very familiar. Also this text carries strangeness and embarrassment. To write about these photographs just somehow does not suit them from the beginninig.
Tomáš Pospěch