Ewa & Jacek Doroszenko / EXERCISES OF LISTENING

With Two Hands and a Magnifying Glass, Martin Lukáč is searching for something and so am I. We are searching for completely different things. Within his work, I am hunting for a deeper meaning that goes beyond his skilled aesthetic decision-making. He is searching for a way to escape this.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were named after Italian Renaissance masters – Donatello, Leonardo, Raphael and Michaelangelo. If anything this represents an example of the re-terretorialization of art into the realm of pop-culture, which is not an uncommon occurrence. Portraying these fictional crime-fighting characters on canvas plucks them out again from their designated position, and a constant back and forth shifting takes place. Their forms have been ground down to shabby silhouettes bearing sniggering grimaces and their numbers surge, they multiply and transform into ghoulish or uncanny versions of one another. These are not portraits, but likenesses, looking into cracked mirrors. Repetition and excess are ever-present throughout Lukáč’s work, which suggests a long pursuit, an exhaustive endeavor. For this exhibition the focused effort has been magnified, however, one cannot say that there is any sign the artist has found what he is looking for – there is no hint of satisfaction or closure. Instead, there is a feeling that the repetition may continue unceasingly, whether through creating twenty paintings or a thousand.

This notion of excess also leaks from Lukáč’s work as he regularly traverses the barriers between art, design, and fashion. Taking symbols from pop-culture, his gestural abstract paintings can be found placed within installations that resemble stage sets of Nike sneaker commercials. These deliberations are neither critiques of nor odes to consumerism – but lie somewhere in between. The question is whether or not the viewer can tell the difference between the very references he uses, and the original sources themselves. Perhaps it does not matter. I believe that Lukáč and his work are one in the same – that he takes on a kind of Deleuzian “controlled hysteria”, where the artist becomes the work, which in turn reflects the intensity of sensations and impulses present within him. Perhaps the works do not mirror one another after all, but the artist himself – the reflection of which is a bit arrogant, distorted, and unfinished – as all humans are.

Martin Lukáč (born 1989 in Piešťany, Slovakia) is a painter currently living and working in Prague. Lukáč’s work often nods to or directly references the recently-past aesthetic forms he encountered during his life growing up in post-occupied Bratislava. Subjects or motifs from 90s pop-culture (music, sports, television) are often present, and declare themselves through a certain gestural repetition on the canvas. Lukáč graduated from the Painting Studio of Jiří Černický and Marek Meduna in 2016. His most recent solo exhibitions include No Love all Hate at 35M2 Gallery, Prague, and "Bon Appétit” (duo show with David Krňanský) Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, Romania. He exhibited his work in group exhibitions in The National Gallery in Prague – Trade Fair Palace (2016), Leto, Warsaw (2016), I: project space, Beijing (2016), and Galerie AMU (2015), among others. He will exhibit his work in Nevan Contempo (under the name BHG) in December 2016.
T: Christina Gigliotti

Ewa & Jacek Doroszenko / EXERCISES OF LISTENING

23.03.2016 - 30.04.2016

Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
23rd March - 4th May 2016
Opening: 23rd March 2016 at 7 pm

Photo: archive of Ewa a Jacek Doroszenkom

Sound is a process of moving particles. Hearing is a physical, biological process. We are constantly experiencing sound, but most of it goes unnoticed because we are really not listening to it. Listening begins when we become conscious of sound and focus on this sense. In the art by Ewa Doroszenko and Jacek Doroszenko sound is treated as a legitimate material of a field of visual art.

“Exercises of listening” is a continuation of the project by Ewa Doroszenko and Jacek Doroszenko. The show consists of videos, graphic prints and sound installations in which audible and visible spheres interact with each other and the narration is based on the associations freely suggested by memory. Listeners find themselves more concerned with things than with sounds, which do not exist as visible matter. People often ascribe a meaning of a sound to object that created it. Putting these objects together makes some kind of narration and storytelling. This is the main reason that Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko typically use a representation of objects to reveal an audible essence of reality.

Video works “The same horizon repeated at every moment of the walk”, created during an artistic residence at the Fundació AAVC Hangar in Barcelona (2014) and “It’s hard to find a polyphonic body”, produced during an artistic residence at the Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik, Norway (2015), shows the landscapes that becomes a musical notation system. In these short audio-visual compositions, an activity of moving figure determines the pitch on the scale of each frame, from higher to lower. Primary elements of a musical composition by Jacek Doroszenko are left to the determination of Ewa Doroszenko as a performer. Jacek Doroszenko creates also a combination of sounds that have been captured in an immersive environment. The installation consists of loud speakers. Each speaker emits different track and all together produce a high frequency sound wall, full of details.

Ewa Doroszenko confronts herself with acoustic environment through more remote references, attempting to translate selected audio events to the visual language. Her graphic prints illustrate the flow of sound material: collecting, archiving and reproduction in the context of digital times. As well as audio recordings, graphic collages consist of detailed layers, but the basis for these works is a connection to modern music notation systems. Ewa Doroszenko uses graphical language to articulate the characteristics of a particular sound recording: rhythm, pulse, progression are elements of each composition also in a field of visual expression.

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