Jiří Staněk / Brightness

The first of two overview exhibitions assesses the collecting activities of the Fait Gallery, initiated by Igor Fait and systematically developed since 2012 in synergy with the chief curator Denisa Kujelová, who worked in the gallery until mid-2025.

Given the extensive nature of the collection which comprises over 1,000 items, and considering the multiple artistic approaches and the time span covered by the collection, which ranges from the pre-war avant-garde to contemporary art, it appeared natural to organise two consecutive shows.

In order to maintain a certain homogeneity in the exhibition, it was necessary to find a simple and universal key for selecting the artists and individual works. In most cases, this took the form of an abstract geometric-constructivist tendency which, with a few exceptions, involved pure minimalism, while in other cases it was softer abstraction with connotations of a reality-inspired starting point.

Part of the exhibition is devoted to the presentation of pre-war modernism, making up the core of the collection from the very beginning. It is the cubist tendency, evident in the works of Emil Filla and the more frequently represented Antonín Procházka, that forms a link with the mentioned geometric-abstract tendency which in many cases takes on a mathematical character in the works of artists active in the second half of the 20th century.

In connection with cubism, it is also necessary to mention that the exhibition includes several works related more to contemporary art which can be described as explicitly figurative, mediating a kind of neo-cubism and thus making an exception from the rule within the exhibition concept.

A confrontational aspect is supplied by the younger generation of artists fluidly incorporated into the exhibition. They function as a subtle refreshing and at the same time convey the message that the recycling of basic forms defined in the first half of the 20th century is still relevant, even though the artists' starting points are now quite different.

From the media perspective, the exhibition provides an overview of the segment of the collection that exclusively addresses traditional art forms such as painting, drawing, graphic art, objects, sculpture, assemblage, and various types of collage.

The overall aim of the exhibition is to present the part of the collection relating to the mentioned trends, to define and demonstrate formal and content-unifying elements among artists across the given time scope, and to set them in a mutual context.

Ondřej Kotrč

Jiří Staněk / Brightness

19.10.2022 - 14.01.2023

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Jiří Dušek

Exhibition architecture: Jakub Němec

Opening: 19 October 2022, 7 pm

The Eye, its Brain, our Universe and Jiří Staněk's Wavefronts

Sight is a miraculous organ and clearly the most important human sense. Through it we receive up to eighty percent of information about the world around us. It is an amazing result of evolution which has brought it to near-perfection over tens of millions of years. Its marvellous anatomy, the intricate processing of the captured image, the interaction between the eyes and the brain - we still have only very vague ideas about all this.

Yet the wondrousness of our world goes even further... A stream of visible light, i.e. light which the human eye can perceive, sometimes acts like a staccato of the individual elements and sometimes like a wave, and not only at the level of the imperceptible microworld but also in our own eyes. The passage of light through the cornea, lens and the vitreous body is defined by the laws of geometrical optics. And we know that it only takes a few dozen individual photons to irritate the light-sensitive cells - cones and rods.

We don't know why our eyes get flooded with tears as a result of an emotional outburst. We don't know why nature has endowed us with the sclera that enables us to communicate without words. We don't know why the sensitivity of our eyes - unlike many other living organisms - is so limited. We don't know why and how the human brain can organise so well the chaos our eyes record. We don't actually see reality, the perceived world is not real. Everything is a stream of photons that is somehow interpreted by our brain - everything exists only in our imagination.

Jiří Staněk also took the path of visualization of waves and elements. His grids of paper installations are in fact macroscopic wavefronts that change appearance with the viewing angle of an astonished viewer. On closer inspection, they resemble detailed views of the surface of the Sun. The surface is structured by granulation, i.e. peaks of upward currents several hundred degrees warmer than the surrounding environment, which transfer energy from the inner areas towards the surface.

Thanks to this, the visible part of the Sun is heated to the temperature of five and a half thousand degrees Celsius. Thanks to this, life on planet Earth has been possible for four billion years. Thanks to this, the eye that has hatched from the brains of our ancient ancestors can perceive its own universe. Thanks to the imagination of the artist Jiří Staněk and the visitors, the Brightness exhibition exists.

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