Fait Gallery & Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
6/4 – 16/5/2013
Opening: 4/4/2013 at 7pm
Curator: Jiří Ptáček
In the new sculptures by Krištof Kintera there is an obsessive attachment to matter and the process of its controlled and spontaneous transformation as well as to pop-cultural background from which the author draws the content and context of his artistic work.
This doesn’t mean an unexpected twist or making visible the yet hidden mental horizon. Kintera’s work is consistent in form and content and it has been continually evolving since the early nineties, when as a young student of Academy of Fine Arts he began to attract the attention of professionals to quickly become one of the most sought-after artists of his generation. Recently, he has reached the laurels of broad social acceptance which somehow cover first gray hair on his continuously shaved head.
“Still, there is some justification for the primary forms of sculpture,” he said last year to Marianna Serrano in an interview for the exhibition catalog Výsledky analýzy in the Municipal Library in Prague. For Kintera, these new justification became the inartistic “sculptures” such as snowmen, inflatable toys or carpet rolls. Such models can be generally called folk objects. For Kintera, who since the middle of the last decade was interested in re-constellations of objects of everyday needs, the snowmen and such became examples of differently motivated but still ordinary need to interact with a physical three-dimensional object.
Kintera doesn’t show us these objects because of factual statement of its nature. He penetrates into them and deforms them really and symbolically. He seeks to amplify their emotional functioning with a sculptural gesture. His aim is the intensity of the experience. In the sculptures from the last time the amplification translates into more and more horrifying content with occasional overlaps to apocalyptic-religious context.
The fundamental formal manifestations of this tendency are evocations of instability and collapse – a collapse of a form in mutual relation accompanies the collapse of content. Although Kintera’s sculptures were in the past based on irony, criticism and persiflage which were related not only to the topic but also to the artistic discipline itself which through its history have built a strong belief in its own grandeur and thus faces Dadaistic beatings (and here we might even wonder how is Kintera’s work related to the work of Karel Nepraš), it is possible to consider a large part of Kintera’s last sculptures a ventilation of the need for undermining his own foundations. On the statues, which at first glance resemble its former elegant design solutions, there are more and more apparent low-tech and bastling. The methods of productive regression are also the embedding into mass, dissolution, racking up the shapeless pile or the effort for maximum material hybridization. The last of his toys and especially some neo-centaur mutants in so far unprecedented scale claim allegiance to pop-cultural archetypes in a fake reality of bad horror movies and bloody novels.
The last output of Kintera’s obscure efforts is an imitation of a pile of half blown-away snow. Last time I saw the fascination with these forms it was in the photos of the Czech-Hungarian photographer Viktor Kopasz and he (and many others) saw in these last relics of winter a record of human activity and other influences, the natural ones and the ones connected to urban life. Piles of snow are non-statues whose lack of form and dirtiness is a result of rivalry between man and nature. Kintera is imitating them with the effort for maximum accuracy and presents them as gallery works that we would walk around and visually absorb. The absurdity of such activity, however, is the justification for primary forms of sculpture just like Kintera’s constant search for interfaces (no matter how exploited) with a laic spectator.
