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

We have worked since 2019 under the unconductive trash label, which is an anagram of our home towns - Duchcov (Michal Pěchouček) and Traunstein (Rudi Koval). This fatalism-tinged pun metaphorically expresses the internal aspects of the joint working method. Trash accumulates during every creative process and production. Trash is an important and familiar concept from the landscape of cultural values. The The retardation property of the unconductive rules out the regulation of trash and the control of the direction of creative energy. The brand is therefore our distilled manifesto - in art, we do not consider it important to finish things. What matters is the beginning of creative activity, not its completed result. The purpose of our collaboration is to remove the layers of the past and discover a new artistic identity.

The starting point of our artistic interaction is the easel painting - it proved to be a suitable and accessible means in a joint search for a new linguistic and content identity. At the core of our collaboration is the desire to shed the layers of our own past, i.e. to learn to forget our original artistic handwritings. We explore a new painterly handwriting through different materials and methods, including the space and time dimensions of art. In a pair, it is possible to discover new subjects for artistic retelling and new ordinariness. We experiment with artistic means while trying to "moderate" the intensity and interconnectedness of joint everyday activities. We include in art not only common knowledge but also ordinary experiences, situations that can be planned and experienced together. We focus on one-day and long-term challenges. We try to employ this experience of subtle everyday reality in robust wholes such as exhibitions.

The title of the current exhibition LARGELY OBSERVED is inspired by one of the terms of the European macroseismic earthquake scale. It identifies a degree of critical condition that is widely observed, but need not be taken fatally - for us it is a possible expression of the quality of the viewer's experience, the power of the inner experience of an artwork. The exhibition opens with our first collaborative works, burning daylight (2020), and continues with unconductive chronology (2023), a series of forty-eight paintings sewn together. At the centre are two extensive cycles of paintings, gold tint (2022) and virgin blue (2023), inspired by research into visual evidence of suppressed stories of the past. We have conceived the exhibition as a dialogue between two worlds: past and present, big and small. Through monochromatic work with colour and figurative detail, we attempt to tell real stories of the 20th century that resonate with our everyday lives today.

virgin blue (2023)

This installation of paintings and a monumental work close to architecture, design and large-scale relief painting is inspired by period photographs of one of England's first women football teams, Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C., which was formed during the First World War. Despite achieving considerable popularity and sporting success, the team faced strong opposition from the Football Association which banned women from playing on their pitches and stadiums for fifty years. The reason for the ban was to "protect" women who, according to the association, were not physically capable of playing football. The series of paintings thus refers not only to the pitfalls of women's emancipation but also to the period of the world wars, marked by many structural social changes.

burning daylight (2020)

The first works of unconductive trash were created as an experiment - the artists jointly modified paintings created by Rudi Koval in 2017. The burning daylight series thus captures the moment of the encounter of two artistic personalities and their incompatible handwritings. A dialogue between abstraction and figuration, the painterly approached surface and the drawing of a sewing machine, the removal of a canvas and its stretching onto a different format, the elimination of what already existed as well as the clarification of work with paint were all part of a search for new procedures and subjects.

unconductive chronology (2023)

The continuous series of forty-eight paintings is conceived as a monumental element in space and as a sequence of film frames for a motion picture. The individual canvases show an intervention that shrinks their surface through repeated stitching, thus creating volume. The fabric creases irreversibly even after stretching on a wooden frame. Unconductive trash works on two sewing machines simultaneously, with minimum checking of the result and according to specified conditions that are repeated. In doing so, they capture a personal unity in something that is both work and idleness, that is both festive and ordinary.

unconductive loop (2023)

The subject of this interactive installation is the mechanics of the sewing machine, its magical sound and its unsurpassed contribution to human civilization. It is the stepping mechanism of the machine that made the movement of the film strip in the camera possible. The driving force behind this work is the observing audience - without their presence the work wouldn’t exist.

gold tint (2022)

The gold tint cycle of paintings is loosely inspired by documentary photographs of everyday life of soldiers during the Second World War. For example, a series of reportage photographs taken in 1940 by John Topham while working in the RAF intelligence shows a home guard unit in Gravesend, England rehearsing an entertaining Christmas show - the soldiers performed in female roles and clothes. The rehearsal was interrupted by an alarm and everyone had to move to a defensive position, there was no time to unmask and change into uniforms. The whole story, including the rehearsal, is documented in several telling snapshots. They capture the desire of the British soldiers to forget the reality of war for a while, to have fun and to make present the missing female element - to let the yearning for it sublimate. The images were censored for a long time by the British Ministry of Information to prevent them from being exploited by the enemy as they placed the soldier-hero in a completely new situation.

Gender parody and cross-dressing common in the theatre are not unique in the military, either as evidenced, for example, in the book Soldier Studies (Martin Dammann, ed., Soldier Studies. Cross-Dressing in der Wehrmacht, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2019), with amateur photographs showing scenes featuring German soldiers dressed up as women - scenes that were in direct contradiction to Nazi ideology.

The scenes in the pictures captured through specific gestures and situations symbolically touch upon many aspects of today's discussion on gender stereotypes, human desires and various forms of identities. The artists want to emphasise, among other things, that men are capable of absolute empathy and that femininity is inherent to them. The search for normality and everyday ordinariness is natural for human beings, even in the chaos of war.

macroseismic scale, 2022

A figurative transcription of the European macroseismic scale which, unlike the older Richter scale, takes into account the intensity of human perception depending on physical changes. For example, the degree of largely observed defines the critical condition that is largely observed inside buildings. At this level, no one can pretend not to notice anything. Earthquakes inside buildings are felt by many, but only rarely outside.

you have no power over me, 2023

The textual intervention in the gallery window involves the line used to break the curse at the end of the fantasy film Labyrinth (directed by Jim Henson, 1986). Here, it is intended as a possible analogy to the figures of soldiers, or rather, to their experience of chaos and their desire to get out of it.

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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