LUBOMÍR TYPLT / THEY WON'T ESCAPE FAR

As if the main contradiction of the present didn’t lie in the very problems we are currently facing, from climate change to the revival of populism and misinterpretation. Perhaps the most serious pitfall of today is our inability to share these problems and fears, as well as values, visions and solutions.

There is a name for our involvement with the world, its building and suffering — it’s simply work. We don’t necessarily have to understand it as an occupation but as a process in which our activities and ideas are given sense and co-shape the world in which we live.

By extension, art is not just the production of exhibitions and artworks; it enters our shared imagination, enriching it with images, visions and criticism. At our exhibition for the Fait Gallery we are trying to open up this process, to invite the viewer closer, to the podium which dominates the gallery space and provides the installations with a joint framework and context.

The platform is modified for art, as well as for work and leisure in the form of a co-working space and two in-built lounges supplemented with chairs from Pavla Sceranková’s previous art projects. The podium-table thus assigns the meaning to the individual installations while at the same time it also invites the audience to enter the process, the cycle of work and leisure giving sense to both works of art and our world.

Pavla Sceranková shows the human situation ruled by the current work culture. In a series of plasticine figurines created by the pupils from an art school (the work is called Klára) she lets us observe the dissolving of shapes and the blending and merging of matter. The number of endangered species becomes a metaphor for the current environmental issues, as well
as for joint and applied work which is inevitably multiplied, affected by social expectations, and still can be shared and useful and mediate values, including aesthetic ones.

Milada, again named after a person devising the particular project and working on it, combines an elastic suit with performance. It invites you to a flexible, enchanting but subjugating part-time life which enfolds you like tight-fitting underwear. In contrast, Miloš, a figure rooted in the gallery podium, seeks a base and anchoring, perhaps even the return to reflections on nature and the corresponding rhythm, harmony and deceleration.

Our presence, be it social time or personal experience, seems to develop in loops intersecting the show, as demonstrated by the Ilja installation. It is not just a suspended loom, the return of working techniques to the space of a former factory, the picking up of the threads of work which was interrupted. It also manifests the cyclic nature of work as such, the circle of knitting and undoing, work and leisure, creation and destruction.

Dušan Zahoranský incorporates in his work the subject of communication. In a series of fake phone calls written on dummy cell phones (Mária), he comments on the overwhelming presence of (online) communication today, as well as on the isolated, private, almost absurd dimension of the possibility of instant communication.

The monumental ring (Libor) encircling the gallery ramp brings to the space office furniture and the issues of the stereotypization and commodification of work, or semiocapitalism. Our work environment and application are often subordinated to phenomena such as open space, home office, flexitime, as well as the necessity to be constantly available on email, mobile phone and social networks. In this way, capitalism does not only appropriate our time and work but also the creation of meaning and sense.

In addition, Zahoranský views critically the idea of a universal, non-specific or fully transparent language. In a series of coloured grids of digital characters, Mirek and Kateřina, he stages a combination of type, communication and digital culture, while in the central installation entitled Dušan he symbolically “stole” the letters “o” from his own email communication.

The artist works in similar fashion with the sharing of films on the popular server uloz.to (Artur series). He cut one minute from each film and uploaded the files again; not only to alter the films circulating among the server users, but also to work further with the “stolen” time. This time appears to represent the negative of work time and circulation, the possibility of hiding (as an artist) and working outside the affective loops of digital communication and the capitalist order.

Project was created with financial support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and
Statutory city of Brno.

LUBOMÍR TYPLT / THEY WON'T ESCAPE FAR

21.09.2012 - 01.12.2012

Fait Gallery
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Strret), Brno
21/9 – 1/12/2012
Opening: 20/9/2012 at 7 pm
Curator: Petr Vaňous

Lubomír Typlt proves that an image is a synthetic medium that can hardly ever by completely used up. Functional principle of a continuous renewal of this means of expression is put into communicating vessels of authorship and an era. An era requires images and evaluates them in terms of chronology. Authorship frees the works of art of a time line and breaks the space-time in a completely different way which can be described as cyclical or ritual. Therefore Lubomír Typlt can return back to figurative painting and recycle seemingly used up figuration without repeating himself in his paintings. He updates the figure but his act makes present, in a certain generalization, current feeling.

In the set of figurative paintings, Typlt works with an extreme dynamic nature of means of expression. Expressive abbreviation is gradated by diffusive emotional colorfulness. The author thematizes, it seems, primarily the laws of painting as such. Because what else is painting than an expressive grouping of colors. In exhibited works there are adolescent characters everywhere but they are mainly carriers of colorful spots rather than thematic references. The color models, gives the characters life, makes them visible. The color tells stories. It itself is a narrative medium which becomes independent and frees the figure of its role of literary server. Painting is an energy metaphorically translated into color sharpness and vibrancy of young bodies. Groups of people running against the horizon still acquire critical drive in the paintings. Waste of energies. Effort to stay in the running group. Absurd and meaningless changes of direction. Constant monitoring of terrain. Repetitive motion without beginning and without end. Running without rest. Also the age of figures conveys experience with socialization, integration into society. It is here where the first collectives full of cruelty and injustice arise. It is here where the characters are sown and modeled. In a game that is no longer childish, but not yet associated with full responsibility. Typlt generalizes the dividing-line between curiosity, uncouscious and awakening which can even have destructive character

The name of the exhibition, Dalekou neutečou / They won’t escape far mocks the simple defensive reaction of a child, who, by measuring the distance, measures the quality of security. We won’t be able to escape the image and painting, if they rise from their present. The sight of them is only for the strong ones. To stare into the face of futility is the first and necessary step to understanding our own inevitable mortality. There’s no other way.

Petr Vaňous

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