THE FRAGMENTS OF SETS / THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

The most remarkable, for some perhaps somewhat old-fashioned but at the same time unusually topical aspect of Lenka Vítková's work is its emblematic nature. However, not in the art-history sense of the word when an image is directly linked with a text in a single sign unit which contains a gnomic title, allegorical representation and an epigram revealing the meaning of the enigmatic title and the even more enigmatic representation. In her case, the emblem is more appropriately understood as a metaphor for a variety of rather personal tactics and artistic strategies in uncovering meaning by obscuring it, and a multifaceted manifestation of the unity of poetry and image.

It is therefore not a literary extension of a work of art, or, conversely, of the imagery of texts but, first and foremost, a condensation of lived experience that allows the artist to perform meaning through a multi-directional exchange between the seen, the thought and the written, an exchange conducted through words, a spatial intervention, sound or moving image, a painterly gesture or the selection and processing of a specific material - in recent years, for example, plaster, which is not just the basis for painting etudes but also comes into play as a visually and haptically active thing-sign. The title of Lenka Vítková's current exhibition and the accompanying publication, First Book of Emblems, is therefore an explicit acknowledgement of the principle of her creative practice, as well as the artist’s suggestion of how the viewer (and the reader) could approach them.

Waving, circling, approaching and receding, leaning, walking, falling. Transformation. A meaning created by the movement of words and the action of the painted surface, by an image related to a sentence. A meaning emerging from the image following a sentence, from a sound or film sequence as a transposition of a word or image. Lenka Vítková's approach to her work is typified by a special kind of civility and ability to speak for herself in relation to the emerging whole of the world through subjects whose prospective banality is cancelled not only by the mentioned emblematic nature but in recent years predominantly by working on the painting, painting as a still-effective way of showing what I mean. Clues which are obviously distilled starting points include not only signs, abstract patterns and abstracted realities or objects and configurations of the seen - glimpsed, but also objects, body fragments and figures. Yet it is always about the whole. Indeed, the subtle objectivity of the subject with which Lenka Vítková is currently working is accompanied at every step by her ability to share much broader contexts, more like a condition than an explanation of the present ones, which make the choice even more significant. Or, last but not least, there is that unsentimental way in which the artist, through painterly means, lays out and activates the surface in order to keep in play the affective qualities of the creative process and their sources.

If Lenka Vítková's works and exhibitions sometimes make the sympathetic viewer feel slightly dizzy, it is due to the continuous stream of exchange between seeing and intellectual work. Her art (she is an exceptional colourist among painters of her generation and beyond) amplifies and intensifies the feeling of the viewer's physical presence in front of the painting or in its space, while at the same time giving meaning to the actual experience that the recipient is undergoing in a difficult-to-convey state of consciousness. One aspect of this type of artistic experience (emphasized by the tradition of modernism) is the result of long-standing exercises through which we still, albeit rarely, and then with a certain suspicion that we are definitely missing something, master the dialectical relationship in which the self and the universe, immediacy and mediation, subjectivity and impersonality, or tradition and its unique fulfilment, can be found. Although we can speculate about what the postmodern emancipation of the sign universe has made possible for the artist and which line of modernist subjective universalism she may be following, the artist herself has described her art practice most accurately: “I’m coming,/ don't know what I’m bringing./ I’ll start somewhere,/ I’ll do something somehow./ Some things the material will do on its own. The gestures I own.”

Text: Marek Pokorný

The project was financially supported by the City of Brno and Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

THE FRAGMENTS OF SETS / THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

24.01.2015 - 21.05.2015

Fait Gallery
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
24/1 – 21/5/2015
Opening: 22/1/2015 at 7pm
Curators: Denisa Kujelová

THE FRAGMENTS OF SETS

Martin Gerboc, Milan Grygar, Ondřej Homola, Vladimír Houdek, Matyáš Chochola, Věra Janoušková, Jiří Kolář, Eva Koťátková, Karel Malich, Michal Pěchouček, Johana Pošová, Luděk Rathouský, Pavla Sceranková, František Skála, Robert Šalanda, Jindřich Štyrský and Kateřina Vincourová

The current exhibition presents a Fait Gallery collection devoted to the works of authors who work with collages, assemblages, installations, or in their approach often shows the additive principle of layering and composing of various fragments. In general though most art works use a strategy of juxtaposition, moving of found objects as well as the picture material and create sets of differently distant or close realities. The fragmentation is one of the defining characteristics of modernity and a practice that was previously applied only in the arts. Moving of the object from one context to another is a process that, with the start of the industrial revolution, the global trade, the daily movement of huge number of subjects and data, became the determining principle affecting the entire current social and cultural life, but also the man as an individual himself, his identity, and positioning in a dense network of relationships and meanings.

The creative methods of sampling and appropriation brought to the art itself and to the creativity an admittedly high degree of freedom. The collage is therefore one of the major techniques and expressive means of art since the early 20th century up until the present day, especially for its ability to quickly and instantly find context, thanks to the use of shortcuts and paradox. The newly discovered creative role of fragmentation and its metaphors brought to the modern art a new perspective not only on its own subjectivity, but mainly in objectivity in the form of the anonymity of the latent creative potential, such as work with randomness, automation and free association. A rediscovered meaning of analogy has brought new potentialities in work with characters, archetypes and cultural stereotypes, and created a model of quickly changing reality. Analogy may point to a connection of two ideological objects based in different levels, or rather allows to establish deep, but also shallow and frail relations between individual items.

The authors, represented in the selection, approach all these creative strategies from different perspectives and with different motivations. The presented art works thus; approach the principle of collage as a means to search for a distinctive art form and poetry rich in associative and inspiring play with meanings, but also as an element, which through its own essence critically refers to different ways of isolation and exclusion of the details out of the whole and their incept as freely workable and usable sources, objects. In the context of the collages of Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, through surrealistic composition of unexpected encounters, Pop art and the current dominant Internet environment, the artists represented in the selection are not lost in the context, thanks to their unique approaches, experiments and techniques, such as Jindřich Štyrský, Jiří Kolář or Eva Koťátková, who belong among the important names in international art.

We move at the current time along different levels of historic archives and we jump from one cross reference to another, we communicate in shortcuts and fragments that represent large units. We should not forget that the discovery of the work with found objects and their context was closely followed by the efforts to converge the art with everyday life in modern civilization. Therefore from a certain time the art is full of everyday objects in familiar, but also strange situations and conversely everyday life becomes full of art.

Denisa Kujelová

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