I’ll give brownie points to something like Čert 180 g, Loupák pes 60 g, or perhaps Bez omáčky
THE FRAGMENTS OF SETS / THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION
ONE MOMENT / Collector's cycle of important private collections
Part two: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY / Jiří Valoch´s collection
COLLECTOR'S CYCLE OF IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Lenka Vítková / First book of emblems
23.02.2022 - 14.05.2022
Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Exhibition design, artistic collaboration: David Fesl
Graphic design of the book and pendants: Daniela & Linda Dostálková, Sonni Scheuringer
Text: Marek Pokorný
Opening: 23. 2. 2022, 7 pm
I’ll do something somehow
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.
Karel Adamus / Minimal Metaphors
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Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curator: Denisa Kujelová
Special opening day: October 8, 4 pm–9 pm
The conceptual approach first came to the fore in the work of Karel Adamus in 1974, in an extensive cycle entitled Minimal Metaphors exploring the relations between verbal or visual elements and their subsequent reassessed meaning in the title. The artist developed this distinctive type of conceptual poetry from 1976 onwards in the Copies series in which he, apart from a play with the terms “original” and “copy,” also articulated or modified the meaning of the original work by means of watercolour and drawing.
The theme of Minimal Metaphors created on the common A4 format is the relationship between a typewritten title and a subject of a poem, expressed with the use of a typewriter and a minimalist drawing, an assemblage or the colour and material properties of paper. Verbal metaphors are the most plentifully represented in this impressive cycle; their material is words where the semantic nature is born by both the signifier and the signified. The relationship between these two components produces a metaphor, i.e. a relationship on the basis of an analogy which the artist presents to the recipient on whose active collaboration strong emphasis is laid in the final execution of the work. The majority of these verbal metaphors go back to the aesthetics of typewritten letters that the artist used in his previous prolific phase of visual poetry, and are thus exclusively executed in typewritten form. However, there are also several poems working with a handwritten text, the stamping technique close to stamp art, poems-drawings and drawings working with “zero experience” in a maximum reduction of the elements employed.
In the following Copies series closely linked with Minimal Metaphors, and sometimes even formally attached to it, the relationship between the title and the subject of a poem, between the signifying component and the signified component, be it a text or a picture, a key element of this part of Adamus’s oeuvre, is accentuated even more. However, to get a full picture, it is also necessary to study other aspects of the work. While the Minimal Metaphors series is limited, with a few exceptions, to the ordinary A4 format, with Copies the format was enlarged in an equal proportion in order to demonstrate the size of the originals.
Subject Poems and Poems – Objects are also based on preset and consciously created associative links, inducing in the viewer a transfer of meaning expected by the artist. The meaning is often anchored in the title which makes up an integral part of the work and leads the observer in a direction set by the artist. In view of this, the frequently voiced connection with ready made art appears incorrect.
Adamus’s art characterised by concentrated communication with minimalized visual expression and work with actually non-artistic means is in this case not a purely intellectual construct on a rational base; nonetheless, its main subject is lyrical stimuli rooted in his inherently poetic nature. This is also illustrated by the fact that Adamus consistently refers to his works including objects as poems. Karel Adamus as a visual poetry artist was introduced to the general public in the early 1970s by the art theorist and artist Jiří Valoch on whose essays this text is based. Valoch also included Adamus in the so-called Brno Circle, along with other artists working on the periphery of the art scene. The main feature shared by these artists was the conceptualization of art, the accent on visual and experimental poetry and the processuality of their work.
The process character of drawing started to manifest itself in Adamus’s art in 1980 in the Flosages cycle. Although chronologically they rank with Minimal Metaphors and to a large extent are also metaphorical, these works can’t be classified with Minimal Metaphors due to their completely different structure and point of departure. The Flosages series consists of sequences of mostly connected lines which are of different thickness but are always in monochrome black pencil of different hardness, or an ink felt-tip pen. They always culminate in one line in colour, and there exist different time intervals between the drawings of the individual black lines (weeks, months but also years). The closing of the growth process with a colour line which gave the cycle its name symbolizes flower (flos in Latin). Despite the fact that Flosages have different shapes, they typically show a repeatedly connected line the phases of which take place in different time periods, and many of them are frozen in the process of growth, awaiting the next phase or the final stage - flower.
A virtual tour of Karel Adamus's exhibition - Minimal Metaphors can be found here.
