TOMÁŠ BÁRTA / THINGS YOU CAN´T DELETE

Even today, we still tend to understand a picture as an autonomous entity, a unique, final object which has a life of its own and naturally separates itself from the whole of the world. For that matter, we have spent a long time pursuing this, so it’s all good! However, there exists a close link between picture and word, including the inner ones. They belong to each other by their very nature, yet we seldom stress that the connection should be direct and, especially, generally accessible so that everybody can go through the same gateway. Then, however, there come moments when a picture communicates nothing but solidarity, shared being and one existence when the picture itself not only moves between horizons and transcends them but it is also absorbed by reality. This fully applies to Petr Veselý’s pictures. Their objectivity involves not only the time dimension but also a transcendental one.

Ernst Gombrich writes in his reflection on illusion that the power of interpretation can’t be overestimated, mentioning J. M. W. Turner whom he views as somebody who deliberately and in favour of what he sees suppresses all he knows about the world.[1] Both are also relevant today, as we are moving on the same border of discernibility. Petr, however, turns not to what he can see but to what he can touch.

The moment of touch is magical, a touch has the power to take life and also to restore it. The laying of hands is an ancient ritual, hands radiate warmth and coolness, recognise, and in some cases also heal. The essence is always the same: the expression of craving for the original, the real, for what is genuine and to what we, at least imaginarily, return. Gombrich does that himself when talking about abstracted forms as a phenomenon of western visual culture which is certainly remarkable yet fatefully lacking any assessment rules. In Petr’s case, however, we move on the opposite side of the spectrum; a picture is an abstract, grey form, yet it is permanently striving at figuration, or evolves from it. At the sane time, what is abandoned calls for attention which is equally reversible, and the movement we perform during its recognition is thus cyclic and without memory. Echoes of objectivity are secondary, yet they have rules – and these manifest themselves in this way.

Petr’s work is about constants which regularly come to the fore. This regards both his poetry and what can be termed the natural life of things. As in a truly home environment things do not just appear but exist, they meander in forms and functions and their being has an order which also involves decline, so they are like this in the artist’s pictures, or rather, his pictures are like that. They show what a close link there is between them and the world if we deliberately insert them in the framework of our existence. Matter captivates.

Petr is aware of this, of course, otherwise he wouldn’t put so much effort into the bridging of the gap between reality and its image, between what has come to pass and what we expect. He also likes to enter this space, shaping it and summarizing it. Medieval altars in museums are the relics of other autonomous worlds, and the objects of the ordinary world devoid of their function are also like that. Naturally, this is an expression of reduction, but also concentration and (controlled) absence which, paradoxically, grows stable in its loss and thus resonates all the more its original function and talent.[2] A hand frozen in motion, a shirt stretched in its bend moving from the field to the picture and beyond expresses this perfectly. As Ivan Blecha writes, “a reflection that the restricted position of the observer (…) leads to a restricted presentation of a thing is wrong and the statement about the necessary non-representationality of some aspects of reality, about its permanent distortion, is in fact unreasoned extrapolation.“[3] A picture is often the only thing left of something that once existed. It is a notch of a knife in a cupboard.

^{^[1]}E. H. Gombrich. Umění a iluze. Studie o psychologii obrazového znázorňování. Praha 2019, p. 235.

^{^[2]} In the last decades the formative task and nature of “things” has also been resumed by the western philosophical tradition, namely by Bruno Latour and object-oriented ontology (OOO).

^{^[3]}Ivan Blecha. Prostory zjevnosti. Dílo ve struktuře světa. Zlín 2018, p. 129.

TOMÁŠ BÁRTA / THINGS YOU CAN´T DELETE

23.11.2013 - 16.01.2014

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
23/11/2013 – 16/1/2014
Opening: 21/11/2013 at 7pm
Curator: Jiří Ptáček

Fait Gallery has given Tomáš Bárta space MEM exactly one year after the arrangement of his solo exhibition Softcore. During this time however Bárta went through a period of major review of his actual means of expression. Softcore was concluded with paintings, where he openly joined the modernist aesthetic. This was followed by simplifying the complicated abstract tangles and formulation of plainer geometric designs, which started to reflect the inspiration by descriptive geometry, ancient order and constructivism. The emphasis on painting as a derivative of the past turned Bárta's attention to archaeological metaphors that are actually applied in methods of layering, penetrating and revealing.

The curator of Softcore exhibition, Jan Zálešák, in the text toSoftcore exhibition correctly emphasized the gradual "sedimentation" and "a move in aslow-growing set of elements" in the artistic development of Tomáš Bárta. One year later, in front of new pictures, we can say that they are the most radical turning point in the author's production so far, but we can also note that Bárta’s production has not left the territory he had previously explored. While the exhibiton At some point, in the moment of a strange flash, I wake up and change the direction of my fall in the Gallery Down in Ostrava during the spring of this year, captured the crystallisation of Bárta's new artistic opinion, in the collection of middle size formats from Things You Can‘n Delete we can already see a developed spectrum of new themes and techniques. The driving factor in these works is Bárta‘s selfawareness of his own roots in the modernistic tradition. At the same time the fragmented layouts of picture compositions started to integrate. On the new paintings therefore the same principle repeats over and over again - the structural priming influences the form of the surface coating and the whole composition completed by a dominant feature in the foreground.

Jan Zálešák related the characteristics of Bárta’s development to the period after graduating from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. Preimage of his present production is to be found in the distant past - the last two to three years of study in the painting studio of Petr Kvíčala. That was when Bárta first transmuted his inspiration by building constuctions, protoarchitecture and remains of building activity in concise abstract morphology. And that's when a "dominant element", a "material body" appeared in this paintings, from which the whole picture is developed or to which the rest of the picture aims. Pictures from Things You Can‘t Delete are, in this respect, Bárta’s first return to this source, although included in new contexts.

The name of the exhibition encounters the content of collective and personal memory in Bárta's work. There are things that can not be erased, which can not be avoided and to which we always return. It's not always a matter of will. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan distinguished between the object of desire and the cause of desire. His interpreter Slavoj Žižek described this distinction as follows: "While the object of the desire is simply an object that we desire, the cause of the desire is a specific feature, for which we desire this object (a detail which we usually are not aware of and sometimes we even see it as a barrier, as the characteristic,despite which we desire the object)." In the pictures from Things You Can‘t Delete we surprisingly find rather the cause of desire than it‘s objects. The point is not so much in the themes of bars and sailyards or methods of layering and scratching but rather in the features and details that make him to paint these themes this way - again, repeatedly and moving forward by returning.

Jiří Ptáček

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