Markéta Magidová / TERTIUM NON DATUR

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.

Markéta Magidová / TERTIUM NON DATUR

15.06.2016 - 30.07.2016

Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
15. 6. - 30. 7. 2016
Vernissage: 15. 6. 2016 at 7pm
Curator: Jiří Ptáček

Three years ago, a visual artist and art theorist Markéta Magidová held a solo exhibition Domestic dictionary in Brno Gallery Kabinet. She complemented a 3D installation by a printed dictionary interpretation of terms and phrases specially used only within her family. Interpersonal bonds within this basic social unit could have been viewed as a network emerging and confirming itself through language.

For Markéta Magidová the use of a wide range of artistic media is important. She, however uses spoken or written word, so regularly, that the exploration of these could be viewed as the significant focus of her work. It is the same case with the exhibition Tertium non datur. The installation part of the exhibition and the video are based on a single principle: the metaphorical use of the number 3. In the spatial installation created of objects and photographs there could be found traits that make the exhibition resemble as well as differentiate from the previously mentioned Domestic dictionary. As a similarity between the exhibitions you can see the efforts of the artist to bring together the fullest list of labels and names that, in this case, include the number three. The third eye, third hand, the tripod, the Third Reich ... Unlike the Domestic dictionary, however,this exhibition does not come with interpretation. It loosely lays one next to the other and leaves it upto us if we discover partial connections or the inability to create any justification for collecting these "third things" at one point. The consequence might be the impression that we are facing a somewhat obscure collection.

Magidová though monitors the role of language in shaping the thought structures and value systems. At the exhibition, called by the logical principle of allowing only two true statements, she draws the attention to "exclude" the third option. She focuses on the names that indicate redundancy, failure, a mistake, otherness, etc. She focuses on the deeply rooted binary schedule of human thought, within which case it is only considered to be "complete" and flawless. The author's intentions are yet political, at least as a discussion with the thought schemes, for which the deviation is considered a disadvantage without examination of its potential benefits. Exactly for this reason a part of the exhibition became a video in which the mime artist Petr Biel improvises movement of creations on three legs. It causes laughter or contempt within the audience. The question, however, is whether these two immediate emotional reactions are only two ways of rejecting that potential before it slowly starts to root.

T: Jiří Ptáček

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