PAVLA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

In a distinctive visual style rooted in his personal memory, Jan Merta transforms real-world subjects into specific projections of his own experiences. This unusually sincere approach is in its intensity and truthfulness towards the viewer remarkably transferrable and communicative. In most cases, the artist chooses as the subject matter of his paintngs, drawings and objects things and situations on the edge of ordinary attention that, however, are personally highly important for him. By removing them from their original context and by their free processing he fills them with new contents. The pure essence of seemingly ordinary objects demonstrated on a monumental scale with the use of unconventional; spatial structures provides Merta’s paintings with a strange tension, which is in some works even intensified by the refined employment of light and the atypically approached relationship between object and area when an accentuated background creates an illusory perspective.

All of Jan Merta’s works have their own raison d’etre in particular stories, and his art is so closely linked with personal experiences that it could be understood as the artist’s diary records of events, experiences, memories and reminiscences of people, objects and places. Every new painting is for him a return in thoughts, and it is therefore hardly surprising that he has chosen this word for the exhibition title. However, it should be viewed at several levels of meaning: apart from the tite of a sculpture, the motif of return also refers to the show itself, organised in exhibition rooms to which Jan Merta returns with his new project after eight years. First and foremost, it refers to regular returns to the artist’s key theme circles, as well as to particular motifs which are, nonetheless, always approached in a different way.

Within the Return exhibition, sections such as Liberec are important; the artist returns in it to the places associated with his childhood and has worked on it, on and off, for several years, as is the subject of civilization threats and cultural codes as homage to Old Masters and specific works of art. One example is Goya’s painting Third of May 1808 (1814) from which Merta borrowed the motif of a lamp. The lamp as a source of light is a vital element of the picture, not only in its form but also in its content, and Merta has utilised it several times. Last but not least, the exhibition presents works referring to the artist’s penchant for Eastern philosophy. In 2010 and 2013 Jan Merta designed the book Laozi translated by Oldřich Král, and his close friendship with this extraordinary figure reinforced his interest in Chinese philosophy. In the Fait Gallery exhibition project this leading sinologist agreed to incorporate into the LAOZI installation his sound recording of the book accompanied by Merta;s paintings with fragments of cups and saucers. These symbolize clay vessels: according to the teaching of the Tao, the meaning and purpose of their internal parts only come from emptiness.

PAVLA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

27.09.2014 - 13.11.2014

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
27/9 – 13/11/2014
Opening: 25/9/2014 at 7pm
Curator: Jan Zálešák

How many things that surround us do we really understand? But we can still use them, touch them, speak to them, put them into motion. This deep, while unconscious understanding that seems to be inscribed in the motions and that is build by motions, touches and gestures, takes an important place in the work of Pavla Sceranková.

In the early stages of her career, Pavla Sceranková was searching for ways to "animate" - how to depict or categorize movement - while remaining in the area of sculpture or object creation. An example result of this search are the objects from the cycle Memory as a new reality (2006). A slightly different approach has been used in a more recent series of objects Yes or No (2010). Items that we well know as silent partners in our rooms and kitchens (lamp, porcelain dinner service) seem to explode in front of us, but just before the fractions have managed to fly in all directions, someone pressed the PAUSE button. In addition to works in which the motion remains only a kind of unfinished option Sceranková also creates sculptures and objects, that the audience can touch, and therefore they can not only by looking, but also by moving update the contents that are placed in them.

The installation in the Fait Gallery MEM is loosely based on the author's exhibitions Woman on the Moon (Old Town Hall GHMP, 2013) and Constellation (Atrium MG in Brno, 2013). In both she was searching for ways to expand the dimensions of the viewer's experience and understanding tied to personal and physical experience of a metaphorical move in the universe. Great and for the vast majority of people a truly unimaginable size of the world "out there" in these exhibitions formed a counterpoint to the "small" human experience again based in "small", familiar subjects.

The form of the installation in the MEM gallery was significantly influenced by meetings with Dr. Bruno Jungwiert from the Galaxies department at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Discussions with an expert on the dynamics and the evolution of galaxies brought Pavla Sceranková to a key theme of the exhibition, which is the collision of galaxies. In order to appreciate the drama of this event, we must be able to think in scales and in time periods that almost exceed our imagination. If the human observer was inside such a collision, he would not, because of the vast distances between (potentially) conflicting elements, notice anything at all.

This paradox intrigued the author and the desire to let the audience literally enter into the colliding structures became the starting point in the design of the exhibition. The symbolic move into intergalactic space is, on the material level of the installations, connected with the intimate space of the kitchen or the dining room - the space, which, aside from the already somehow outdated cultural stereotype characterising it as a purely female area, is primarily a family space, a space of harmony, but also an arena of conflicts and battles. If we put a piece of saucer or pot mounted to the end of the rotatable structure into motion, we risk a real crash and also animate a model of the universe. Therefore there is a crash of not only incommensurable formats, but also incommensurable time dimensions. The human time in which we are born, die, fall in love and hold deep hate is, in the context of "space-time" of a galactic collision, completely worthless. But maybe the opposite is also true, when a scientific version of the absolute crumbles under emotions, that may be put into a motion by a piece of rotating kitschy chinoiserie...

Jan Zálešák

Go back