LUCIA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

“I am sure, that there are correlations in the world, the sound is connected to the visual and also the visual doesn’t exist without the acoustic.”

Milan Grygar has been exploring the specific concept of relations between visual and acoustic in very diverse and often contradictory parallels for more than five decades. The fact that in the context of the Czech art scene Grygar is absolutely remarkable, is influenced by his interest in experimental music and the follow up of the development of international inter media tendencies based in the contemporary avant-garde music (beside the system of free atonality of Arnold Schoenberg, we can mention the Notation of New Music by Erhard Karkoschka and the aleatoric concept of John Cage).

With regard to other artists experimenting with the new music and its alternative graphic notations, Grygar`s work was defined mainly by the possibility of correlations of acoustic and visual components which determine each other. In the case of Milan Grygar, sound is not tied to the artwork just by associations based on synesthesia (however it is possible to think about his work in this way, without any interpretative framework) and it is also not a completely autonomous element. It is a completely unique principle in art, when the acoustic perception gets a fuller emphasis when creating the artwork in such a sophisticated way that the picture becomes actually retrospectively an instruction, a transcription of how to read it once more, but on the acoustic level this time.

By trying to clarify the process itself and the direction of motion, he additionally discovered (with the help of tape and video recording) the hidden potential of this twofold connection. This dual dimensionality of visual and acoustic he later completed with the actual recording of the work process. He connected all three levels through mutual time unity and to a simple visual expressive power of the art piece. He, thanks to the sound, added the possibility to define the space and by adding the option to also record the process at the time.

The phenomenon of sound has permanently been present in Grygar’s art work since the mid-60s, when the artist, after focusing fully on the medium of drawing, systematically started to examine it and to record it. The sound, at the beginning defined by a series of individual strokes issued by specific instruments, became an unusual parabola to the visual rhythm. After a series of drawings and paintings with wooden sticks, and acoustic drawings, with the help of other typical tools, he developed polyphonic possibilities of drawing gestures, especially with the help of mechanical self-propelled machines. For those living drawings, as well as in other drawings with a performative character, especially tactile, there is a huge influence of the chance, which, while probably trying for the closest connection of visual and audio elements, he replaces his own will by more objective, not dependent factors. However, the element of presumptive chance is firmly controlled and determined by the artist himself.

In consequent repetition of drawn syntactic formula of the square grid in other types of drawings so called audiplastic and black and white and white and black canvases with linear grids, the sound is shown in different ways, that violate the monotony of structure either by a change of the rhythm, colour or by adding some other drawing element. The acoustic quality of Grygar‘s drawings within modern musical notation is more noticeable in his ranks of formulas and scores. These were, no doubt, created with the idea of a specific audio result. The possibility of interpretation is also open and the presence of the artist at the musical interpretations is absolutely vital.

After more than twenty years, the artist returned to painting a series of black paintings with colored linear elements based on the contrast of monochrome surfaces and sharp, complementarily coloured lines of fixed light.The very large and also very diverse series of Antiphons is created by minimalistic geometrical shapes and subtle lines, which are gradually accentuated with colour. However, the use of bold colours can be dated back to the 60s when the artist created the original models for Spatial scores that were produced in monumental scale almost half-century later. A radical shift occurs in the newest work, where Milan Grygar steps back from the variety of colour and returns to the using of a piece of wood to create a series of large scale drawings and paintings.

T: Denisa Kujelová

LUCIA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

15.10.2014 - 05.12.2014

Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Dominican Square 10, Brno
15/10 – 5/12/2014
Opening: 14/10/2014 at 6pm
Curator: Martin Nytra

THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

The work of Lucie Sceranková is characterised by its emphasis on our perception of photography as a means of exploring the possible forms of reality. Despite, or may be just because of this approach, the reality seems to be relative, variable, or it‘s stable definitive form becomes unattainable. Rather than a print of the reality out of flesh and bones, photography acts today as a technology that creates an autonomous reality, that can do anything with the landscape of rocks and seas. Distinguishable, subjective "me" entered the picture and merged with it in a dream, in which version the world is only a plane of projection of fantasies.

The principal topics of photography, time and movement, are categories that despite the desire to penetrate into their essence only reveal in every next step the imperfection of any, even an intensive attempt for their absolute definition. The image about our own identity that, in comparison with the dimensions of the universe, becomes a subject of a significant disparity. This feature of her work with scale is one of the important means for Sceranková’s work, by which the author copes with her own experience of reality. She translates that into more broadly conceived themes to which the audience can relate through metaphorical depictions and a play with associations. However, it still leaves the audience plenty of space to search for their own interpretations. The personal experience is in the principle non-transferable, but it can be equated. The model, which creates specific conditions for the perception is therefore one of the other important points in the author's reflections about the nature of the world, that can be viewed only through schemes that put us into certain discursive and cultural contexts.

The image of Sceranková’s concept stands on the edge of the area and space where we are only able to recognise familiar and understandable forms, which we try to reach and attach to them as to the way in the belief that at the very end we will get the meaning. Clever work with archetypes and the surreal visions, that works with the psychology of the audience, eventually turns our attention to the reflection of visual culture and the traditional models for reading of the images and also current changes in the understanding of the subjective self in environments of archives of shared memory and language.

Martin Nytra

Go back