Radek Brousil / HANDS CLASPED

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.

Radek Brousil / HANDS CLASPED

07.10.2015 - 04.12.2015

Fait Gallery Preview

Dominican Square 10, Brno

7. 10. - 4. 12. 2015

Opening: 6. 10. 2015 at 6pm
Curator: Jiří Ptáček

Photographer: Michaela Dvořáková

In accordance with the creative principles of the last years Radek Brousil bases his work on the set of photographic objects and photographs for the exhibition Hands Clasped on his own studio practice. In the past, for example, he put in front of the lens the technical equipment of his studio. By this he brought forward not only the existence of tools that in the background actually influence the design of photographic works, but at the same time he was dealing with them as with the "normal models", and he used them for the still life, or for a figure or geometric abstraction.

At the Hands Clasped exhibition the aim and approach are a bit different. The pictures are inspired by studio photographs of liquid and elastic materials and a decision to abandon the traditional format and move the photographs to another dimension. From a semantic point of view, he has actually transferred himself from the photographs as images of reality to their autonomous features - especially the physical, material nature of enlargements. When we are ashamed to say that the photographs are images, without feeling the obligation to add that they are also physical objects, on the top of that objects scenically structuring the white gallery space, we actually personally experience their unusual hybridity. We can, of course, approach them as kind of transformers, that are always what we want them to be, but at the same time we must admit that by this we do not cover their ambiguity enough. But Brousil´s aim is not to expose the inconsistency, but to make real the interleave of two realities of the photos in our minds. Perhaps, that´s why we can – among the scenes in photographs, their formats, and installation – still recognise relationships. Brousil takes into account the dynamics of scenes and derives from them shape and spatial position of the artifacts. The key terms for him are flexibility and fixation, pressure and strain, and the catharsis and movement.

These key concepts can remind us of the intentions of the early avant-garde, not only in the field of photography – for example of futurism. Brousil´s photography (and everything how he proceeds the photos) rather points towards the "outside world and society", towards how we perceive photographs and how we think about them.

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