Kristián Németh / Warm Greetings

The Spectres in the House exhibition marks Bárta's return to the Fait Gallery MEM space after eight years. He has filled this time with work on drawings and paintings, the DNA of which he weaves together from sequences of modernist painting, architectural features, and building and workshop practice. Bárta's new paintings are also rooted in architecture. This time, however, it is as if architecture spawned its own ghosts.

The canvas surfaces of Barta's latest paintings are often conceived as imaginary walls that stand between two spaces. The events in his painterly intentions take place between these three elements: the two spaces and the partition between them. Such pictures inevitably trigger a "reverse course" through the history of European painting, back to Leon Battista Alberti's reflections on the construction of picture space which he put forward in his seminal work De pictura (1435). Yer they might equally be considered in relation to the present.

Instead of a well-organised geometrical fiction of the renaissance pictorial space, followed by a massive cloud of variations on the themes of space and perspective, Tomáš Bárta offers ambiguous spatial relations with a number of internal paradoxes, as well as an illusion of the objects that inhabit these paintings and pass through their plans. By using the motifs of niche and window, or a depression and opening in the surface, he stages an optical interplay with the visual principles of "inside", "outside", "through", "in front of", "above", "below", "over", "in the foreground", "in the background", "between", etc. Although he has one entire wall in his studio covered with brief sketches that make the basic outlines of his future pictures, from the beginning their painting is essentially subordinated to the adventure of immediate construction. The layers and spatial planes of the paintings are created gradually and "unplanned". As a result, they form a relation system; they involve visual paradoxes in a spatial composition.

Bárta's "paradoxical spaces" can be approached as a game with the mimetic aspects of painting. However, they touch upon the most common experiences of the modern man. In the past, Bárta's paintings were frequently reminiscent of the morphology of hi-tech architecture, whose morphology would be impossible to achieve without the massive use of computer technology, or the immersive environment of some computer games, through which we enter worlds that are different in varying degrees from those we physically inhabit. Recently, this area has been enriched by synthetic images created by artificial intelligence. Its potential seems infinite, and that includes a new wealth of possible mistakes that the learning but young machines are making. We usually consider these to be flaws that confirm to vain humans that machine-programmes have not yet achieved our ability to perfectly mimic reality (albeit with the help of other machines and tools). From another angle, however, these new worlds, with all their shortcomings, expand the horizon of the collective imagination about the potential parameters of reality. In a sense, they move the discoveries that visual artists have been making for over a century into the realm of everyday reality. If we focus exclusively on what contemporary technologies bring to our imaginations of space, it is precisely the multiplication and overlapping of perspectives and the loosening of ties to our sensory-bodily experience. And this includes spectres - moments of seeing when we perceive primarily the incoherence and inconsistence of sensory information, moments when perception is inconsistent with our experience, or with "common sense" (sensus communis).

The pictures by Tomáš Bárta (b. 1982) are not paintings "after artificial intelligence" or with its help. Nevertheless, they do reflect the shifts in the perception of reality that the increasingly dominant technologies of visual production are leading us towards.

Kristián Németh / Warm Greetings

12.05.2021 - 14.08.2021

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Michal Stolárik

Opening day: May 12 2021, 5 pm–9 pm

A compositionally and dynamically balanced exhibition environment, formal purity of artefacts, obsessively precise rendering of the individual segments or a naturally developing vocabulary of art symbolism. The latest exhibition projects (Children of Ján Moksó, 2020, New Synagogue; Monument of Possible Fall, 2019, At Home Gallery) of the Slovak multimedia artist Kristián Németh (*1983) define from a perspective view his current artistic handwriting and probably also set imaginary standards of his future work. It is characterised by a natural combination of general subjects and intimate, almost traumatic contents, while the artist does not shun institutional criticism masked by a symbolic artistic language inspired by and derived from everyday reality.

Németh in his post-conceptual approach to the creation of objects, installations, performances, video art and staged photographs continuously touches upon subjects rooted in the functioning of the Catholic church. In some cases he examines, in an almost investigative manner, personal and family traumas, sexuality and sexual abuse, the dichotomy of power, the distorted values and intentions of the protagonists of the church, while at the same time questioning the general idea of the (false) positivity and transparency of the perception of a religious society. Although the institutional criticism of the church makes up a greater part of the artist’s research, he gradually updates it with a more universal content line which is related to more general subjects responding to the state of society.

The unplanned change of the dates of the solo exhibition Warm Greetings caused by the pandemic situation gave the artist an opportunity to review the original project and thus to come up with something new, as well as to reflect on the current political and social situation. At a glance, this site-specific project is based on Németh’s previous work and an imaginary library of the artist’s approaches from which he has selected significant light colours, an airy installation, material and formal variety, minimalist stylization and a stage design approach to the building of the exhibition experience.

The central motif placed at the core of the exhibition environment involves wax objects bent by the effect of warmth and force. Candles deformed by an art technique which Németh originally took from the context of the Eucharist represented in his past projects the vulnerability and the unconscious adjustment of individuals to the canons of the church power. In the current update, their numbers are multiplied, resulting in accumulations of organic wholes that appear homogenous yet, on closer inspection, reveal their unique heterogeneous character. Through the accumulation of destroyed candles Németh illustrates the influences of a superior power, unshakeable external stimuli, social norms, pressures and expectations affecting an individual or a group in the present world. Through the form of an invisible physical gesture and an imaginary “warm greeting“ the artist creates symbolic relics and comments on the process of their birth in the form of stylized images communicating the poetics of a simple gesture between creativity and destruction.

The subtle yet unmistakeable colour scheme of the exhibition project which, apart from the fact that it helps dynamize the space and accentuates the meaning of the individual segments, also reflects the symbolism of the colours used. White is connected with purity, innocence, truth ad justice, while the shade of incarnate pink is related to the feminine, corporeality and homosexuality. Apart from fabrics employed in a stage-design fashion we can observe the selected colour scheme on specially designed abstracted wooden pedestals illustrating stylized traces of the melted candles. Together with stigmatically rendered burnt spots, they indicate the invisible yet clearly present elements of warmth and fire, constituting an important ideological background of the whole project.

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.

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