A Spectre in the House

Tomáš Bárta

 
Gerbera won't break

Anna Ročňová

 
Interweaving

Michal Škoda

 
the little infinity

Marian Palla

 
Matter in Eternity

Habima Fuchs

 
ANONYMOUS FORM OF SQUARE

JIŘÍ HILMAR

 
LOVE LIFE

JIŘÍ THÝN

 
THE SKY SERENE AS A VAST AQUARIUM

NÉPHÉLI BARBAS

 
unconductive trash

Largely Observed

 
Tomáš Hlavina

TLNVXYK Puzzle

 
Filip Dvořák

The Ravine – The Room

 
Jiří Staněk

Brightness

 
Petr Nikl

Wild Flowerbeds

 
Lukáš Jasanský - Martin Polák

Sir's Hunting Ground

 
Lenka Vítková

First book of emblems

 
Inge Kosková

Flow

 
David Možný

Blink of an Eye

 
Kristián Németh

Warm Greetings

 
Jiří Kovanda

Ten Minutes Earlier

 
Karel Adamus

Minimal Metaphors

 
Tomáš Absolon

RAFA MATA

 
František Skála

TWO YEARS' VACATION

 
Olga Karlíková

At Dawn

 
Pavla Sceranková & Dušan Zahoranský

Work on the Future

 
Selection from the Fait Gallery Collection

ECHO

 
Vladimír Kokolia

The Essential Kokolia

 
Alena Kotzmannová & Q:

The Last Footprint / Seconds Before…

 
Nika Kupyrova

No More Mr Nice Guy

 
Markéta Othová

1990–2018

 
Valentýna Janů

Salty Mascara

 
Jan Merta

Return

 
Radek Brousil & Peter Puklus

Stupid

 
Milan Grygar

LIGHT, SOUND, MOTION

 
Svätopluk Mikyta

Ornamentiana

 
Denisa Lehocká

Luno 550

 
Eva Rybářová

KURT HERMES

 
Christian Weidner a Lukas Kaufmann

ERASE/REWIND

 
Markéta Magidová

TERTIUM NON DATUR

 
Tomáš Bárta

EXTERNAL SETUP

 
Václav Stratil

LANDSCAPES

 
Ondřej Kotrč

TOO LATE FOR DARKNESS

 
Kateřina Vincourová

"WHENEVER YOU SAY."

 
Jiří Franta & David Böhm

BLIND MAN’S DREAM

 
Ewa & Jacek Doroszenko

EXERCISES OF LISTENING

 
Jan Poupě

SET OF VIEWS

 
Peter Demek

STATUS

 
Josef Achrer

BACKSTORIES

 
Radek Brousil

HANDS CLASPED

 
Katarína Hládeková and Jiří Kovanda

SIAMESE UNCLE & MONTAGE

 
Jiří Valoch

WORDS

 
František Skála

TRIBAL

 
Jiří Franta and Ondřej Homola

A BLIND MASTER AND A LIMPING MONK

 
Alžběta Bačíková and Martina Smutná

CARPE DIEM

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

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

 
Tomáš Absolon

MONET ON MY MIND

 
Kamila Zemková

THE DEAD SPOTS

 
Johana Pošová

WET WET

 
Ivan Pinkava

[ANTROPOLOGY]

 
SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

READY OR NOT, HERE I COME

 
Veronika Vlková & Jan Šrámek

THE SOURCE

 
Jan Brož

SSSSSS

 
ONE MOMENT / PART ONE: PRIVATE COLLECTION FROM BRNO

COLLECTOR'S CYCLE OF IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

 
Alice Nikitinová

IT WOULDN'T BE POINTLESS TO

 
Ondřej Basjuk

THE CULT EXHIBITION

 
Tomáš Bárta

THINGS YOU CAN´T DELETE

 
HE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

FOR MANY DIFFERENT EARS

 
Katarína Hládeková

TO START THE FIRE

 
Marek Meduna

AMONG THE DOG THIEFS

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

WORDS AMONG SHAPES / SHAPES AMONG NAMES

 
Lukas Thaler

THE PROPELLER

 
Krištof Kintera

Hollywoodoo!

 
Ondřej Homola

ARANGE

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION FOCUSED ON THE YOUNGEST GENERATION

TETRADEKAGON

 
Tomáš Bárta

SOFTCORE

 
Richard Stipl

SENSE OF AN END

 
Lubomír Typlt

THEY WON'T ESCAPE FAR

 
Kateřina Vincourová

THE PRESENCE AS
A TRILL

 
SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

OPEN

 
Christian Weidner
/ Vincent Bauer
/ Cornelia Lein

HERE AND
SOMEWHERE
ELSE

 
The selection from the FAIT GALLERY collection

THE SELECTION
FROM THE
COLLECTION

 
Alena Kotzmannová
/ Jan Šerých

A CHI-
LIAGON



Tomáš Bárta / A spectre in the house

22.05.2024 - 27.07.2024

Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Jiří Ptáček

Opening: 22nd May, 7 pm

 

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.

                                                                                                              


David Fesl / The Clumsy Imitator of Artificial Life

-

Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Text: Will Bradley

Opening: 24th May, 7 pm

 

The Crisis of the Object Revisited

 

Perhaps it most resembles archaeology, piecing together the detritus of this dead civilization in the hope of understanding how and why we might have lived. It is possible to infer much about a culture from these small details: fragments of a pattern in clay, the grooves on an arrowhead or certain scratches on a flat stone. Two kinds of site contribute most to the record: middens and graves. It is rare to find an artefact in the context of its primary purpose. More often it survives where it was discarded, abandoned or buried. And here we also find, metaphorically at least, a key. The grave receives the things that will be wanted in eternity while into the midden go those that will never be needed again – there is a division and a system. But sometimes, of course, we find the same kinds of things in both places. Clay beads for example, a wooden figure, a bundle of letters from a former lover, the skeleton of a cat. It is at these moments – instances of connection or conjunction that seem to cut across the hierarchies we had begun, prematurely we now realise, to imagine – that we must be most attentive. These are the times when the culture seems almost, but not quite, ready to reveal its most important secrets; secrets that had once been sought in the well-preserved shapes of the syrinx or the silver lyre, but have since been carried away by the wind, along with the melodies the instruments once played.

For this and many other reasons, archaeology seems too limiting for a study that ranges so freely across the borders between nature and culture, found and made, and over all that lies between. Perhaps we must reach farther out, into zoology, botany and anthropology, and further in, down through palaeontology and into the rocks, into the Earth itself. We are often reminded that the fossil record is so sparse that it is little more than a history of teeth. Whatever else survives must be transmuted: petrified, encapsulated, imprinted, frozen. So the image of the lost world is pieced together from whatever fragments chance and accident have chosen to offer us: a sabre-toothed tiger drowning in the tar pits of Los Angeles; Muhammed ed-Dib hunting a stray goat into a cave full of pottery jars; these few tail-feathers set in a piece of Cretaceous amber no larger than a child's fist. It is only once the remains have been cleaned and hardened that the real work begins. 

The famous slave owner Thomas Jefferson once believed he had discovered the fossil remains of a giant American lion that he thought might still exist somewhere beyond the Rocky Mountains. However, the leap of imagination required to move from these fragments of teeth or claws to the possibility of a living monster is not only a trial that sifts out hubris and hypocrisy, but a test of our individual ability to conceive of a functioning collective reality. The surviving pieces of the skeleton have been separated from the substrate and laid out on the table, but not yet brought into significant relation. And it is now, as we look again at the material and wonder once more about the value of our methods, that another approach suggests itself. 

This regime of rational imagination, the question of how the wounds of the present can produce the past, is the domain, perhaps above all, of the detective – less an occupation than a meta-figure for the spiritual core of modernity itself. The detective must become convinced both that the world is trying to tell us something, and that the message will make sense and can be read. This psychotic attachment to human reason assumes, among other things, that the universe is a text that, when read correctly, will give one access to the truth. But there is no lost model to which these pieces all belong. The primary procedure here is not analytic, but synthetic. One can easily show that the potential of the analytic method is finite in a universe such as this – a universe built from identical, indivisible quanta – whereas the synthetic method may be infinitely productive, given that each permutation can itself be recycled as new input. 

Alchemy, of course, is the study that has contributed most to the philosophy and practice of the combination of physical materials. We are not talking about simple chrysopoeia, but the melding and remaking by which the raw stuff of existence seeks to regain its original divine form, or by which new kinds of unity may be created. It was the alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan who first essayed, a millennium ago, the creation of artificial life; many practitioners still hold the belief that any operation – purification, corruption, eternal preservation – perfected on alchemical compounds may, in the right circumstances, be performed on the human soul itself. 

We understand that, in defining the method as synthetic, we have knowingly suppressed the essential initial work. This preliminary activity is not the workmanlike preparation of a craftswoman selecting timber, not the decade-long training of the pianist who strives to reduce the techno-physiological barrier between thought and expression, nor the layered process of the still-life painter, arranging ripe fruit, fresh flowers, the carcass of a game bird or a rabbit, cut glass in the candlelight, a cascade of velvet and silver – then sizing, priming, sketching and grinding pigment in a mortar. Or, on reflection, perhaps it is not so very different to this last example. Certainly, even at the early stages of the process, one finds a sensibility at work. We can try to guess the rules, and so naturally we do. A certain range of sizes. Nothing too big to hold in one hand, nothing that moves of its own accord, nothing rotten. Nothing so coded that the code can't be overwritten. Nothing that is out of reach, nothing that was already here. Nothing that can't participate in the process, whatever the process is. But above all, ambiguity, the paradoxical sense of a decision neither made nor refused. It could be anything, but it is not; of all the things it might have been, it is undeniably this thing. 

Where do they come from, these things? In the lexicon of art, they are found objects – and if they're here in front of us they can't be entirely, objectively lost – but finding implies searching, implies looking, implies purpose, as much as it has come to connote chance or happy accident. You can find an answer, find a way through, you think you've found somebody who understands, and then you find that it's too late. The process, whatever the process is, is already in motion. J. L. Borges, in his essay on Kafka, mentions Zeno, Han Yu, Kierkegaard, Robert Browning, Léon Bloy and Lord Dunsany as writers who, if Kafka had never existed, would have no common ground or clear connection, but who may now be grouped together as Kafka's precursors. My guess is that every object gathered here becomes part of the context that will trap the next, and also changes those already found, so that meaning accrues to the relationships. Which is to say that there is a grammar at work, even if, as with any living grammar, its rules cannot be simply written and need not be followed. 

As it turns out, all things have names, or at least they can be named, be caught in language. Each found scrap or fragment (not all are scraps or fragments, I realise; some were complete in themselves before they became parts of a new hybrid object; some things, buttons for example, are always both wholes and parts), is named, but each is also a phoneme or a phrase in the vocabulary of the process, which has not been formalised but remains as close and distant as a voice on the radio, breaking through static as you cross the border at night, talking softly in a language you don't understand, as mysterious and real as birdsong.

André Breton, theorist of Surrealism and originator of the poem-object, spoke of "the sublime procedure which lies at the heart of poetics: it seeks to exclude the exterior object as such and to view nature solely in its relation to the inner world of consciousness". Art need not be a thing in the world; poetry can produce the impression of the thing's existence. Logic – an appropriately dreamlike logic – immediately suggests a therefore, that the impression of a thing's existence may be sufficient to produce poetry. And to achieve the condition of poetry is, as everybody knows, sufficient justification for any act. 

There is an art to this art that the jeweller and the surgeon might both recognise, but it is, of course, possible to go too far: the kitsch violence of a dandelion on cracked concrete; a plastic cigarette lighter in the gizzard of a dead albatross. At some point the stress becomes too much, the sutures of reality fail, and the images consume themselves; the ability to play with this implicit threat of failure, to dance on the cliff's edge, we call technique. It is widely acknowledged that we are living through a transition (we are always living through a transition) from a world dominated by industrial production to a world dominated by immaterial labour, from the world of raw reality to the domain of pure mediation. 

The new class of digital objects – bundles of attributes, metadata, meshes, textures and events – offers a way to evade our limitations, with every kind of risk-free manipulation, endless undos and infinite respawning. In particular, whatever hierarchies or types govern their interactions can always be altered to allow them to merge or intersect. In the ray-traced light of this near-future context, these sculptural conjunctions of metaphorical driftwood seem almost to touch the weightless condition of virtuality, but they can't escape what we can still meaningfully call the reality of their existence. Just as a poem might include an incantation or a prayer, so these assemblages can contain powerful elemental constructions. The Taoist alchemists only had to mix saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur to change the world forever. Our modern materiality has stricter rules, but its truths are no less in doubt. 

Still there is a metaphysics to explore. These recipes, poems, reactions, morphic resonances – these things – may be aligned with deeper forces, speak an older language, and have the power to operate on a plane that touches our everyday universe only at certain privileged moments. If they are not spells whose power has already made itself manifest, we can nonetheless imagine that, beyond their potential to create meaning in the semiotic sense, these embodied texts and condensed sensations might also be employed in what was once called divination. As Lem suggested, since we are trapped in language, the future of the culture can be guessed, if not predicted, by permuting and recombining the words we already have. For example, from the possibility of the word crypto-exopaleobotany we might have expected to encounter the theoretical biologies of imaginary fossil plants extrapolated from recent close-up photographs of the surface of Mars, if not foreseen the strange pleasure to be found in their contemplation. 

A strange pleasure, too, in these artworks, around which time seems to move differently, to flicker, or to ooze like poured honey. I like to imagine some future archaeologist digging through the layers of blackened desert into the buried ruins of 21st century Europe, and to imagine that, by some generous and beautiful twist of fate, the very first thing they find is not an iPhone, or a Volkswagen, or a pair of Crocs, but the archive of David Fesl.

  

Will Bradley

 

QUINN, C. Edward. Thomas Jefferson and the Fossil Record. In: Bios, vol. 47, no. 4, 1976, pp. 159–167. 

BORGES, Jorge Luis.Kafka and His Precursors. In: Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964.

André Breton, lecture delivered at the Mánes Gallery, Prague, 29th March 1935 and The Crisis of the Object, 1936

LEM, Stanislaw. The Futurological Congress. New York: Seabury Press, 1974.

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