NÉPHÉLI BARBAS / THE SKY SERENE AS A VAST AQUARIUM

The exhibition sums up the last fifteen years of work of the Brno painter Petr Kvíčala. The artist returns to the post-industrial environment of the gallery where he presented a retrospective of the first two decades of his work in 2008. In the imaginary total of both exhibitions, we arrive at an impressive time span of more than thirty-five years, during which the mentioned "research" into the field of ornament has been taking place. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Petr Kvíčala made a name for himself with an original synthesis of the language of geometry and postmodernism. This is how he approached the defence of ornament as both an issue of mathematical order and an aesthetic phenomenon of a fading reputation. Ornament was rehabilitated, and the red wavy line became Kvíčala's signature form.

Ornaments, along with the wavy line, most often in the shape of a crenellation or a zig-zag line, continue to permeate Kvíčala's paintings like a mycelium, sometimes hidden, sometimes explicit. This polarity is perhaps more distinct in the period covered by the current exhibition than in the previous stages of his work. On the one hand, there are paintings constructed by a fine ornamental network, as if "embroidered", from which geometrical bodies of delicate colours pop out; on the other, robust, almost rustic ornaments resulting from gestic strokes of a broad brush. In recent years, the dichotomy between subdued monochromy and festival colours has found a background in the artist's life, asymmetrically divided between the city and rural seclusion. The rediscovered closeness to nature brings back into Kvíčala's current situation reminiscences and updates of his artistic discoveries made more than three decades ago. Once again, woodworking comes into play, parallel to painting. Large wooden objects should be understood primarily as extensions of Kvíčala's painting into the third dimension, offering the viewer, among other things, an immersive experience of entering the "inside" of the painting.

Kvíčala continues to work in open cycles in which he explores, tests and exploits his artistic discoveries. The exhibition, tailor-made for the unique space of the Fait Gallery, is an opportunity for the audience and the artist himself to examine the results of this work. Petr Kvíčala has invited the artist Karíma Al-Mukhtarová to his exhibition as a special "guest". Intuitively, he feels a loose affinity with her work which he associates with a sensitivity close to the art of Eva Kmentová. If Kvíčala's construction principle of his paintings was named "manual geometry" in the early days, for Karíma Al-Mukhtarová, the manual approach is analogically vital - primarily the demanding work of embroidery, where the needle and cotton penetrate impenetrable materials such as glass or wooden beams. The hidden geometry principle, represented by the implied orthogonal structure that is inevitably present even in intimate handiwork such as obsessive embroidery, perhaps unsurprisingly meets the fundamental principle of Kvíčala's work, which is an interest in the order of nature and its disruption.

Ondřej Chrobák

Petr Kvíčala has created several artworks in the public space in Brno:

- a monumental painting on the glass frontage of the Passage Hotel (2019), Lidická Street 23,

- the frontage with figurative drawings on the new church of the Blessed Virgin Mary Restituta (2019), Nezvalova Street 13,

- the Zig Zag 3,2 sculpture (2014) next to the building of the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Husova Street 18,

- painting in the Festive Hall, a terrazzo floor and painting on the vaults in the Reduta Theatre (2005), Zelný trh 313.

NÉPHÉLI BARBAS / THE SKY SERENE AS A VAST AQUARIUM

25.10.2023 - 13.01.2024

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Eva Slabá

Opening: 25th October, 7 pm

In her most recent body of work, Néphéli Barbas explores the everyday metropolitan experience by recording small details such as rain-soaked bus stops, the reflections of mirrors in bars and glass arcades. In this way, she reveals her fascination with contemporary cities as she captures the complex interplay of different historical layers that occurs in these places. Her small, meticulous drawings replicate the verticality of large cities, while her installations in metal and coloured glass present a serene alternative to the usually bustling and ever-changing urban environment.

The latest series of works by the French artist of Greek origin, Néphéli Barbas, is based on her long-term wanderings through the urban environment. Although these are personal captures of the flickering reflections of bus stops after rain, mirrored bars, glass-roofed arcades and fishmongers, Barbas succeeds in sensitively interpreting the shared everyday of metropolises. Through the artist's tracing, we therefore find places that are difficult to pinpoint on a map, places whose signs and structures are similar. Just as Italo Calvino, in his Invisible Cities^{^[1]} shows that each person carries in his mind a city that consists only of differences, a city without shapes and a certain form that real cities complete, so Barbas shows through her works how Prague can be Paris or Brussels Buenos Aires. In Calvino's words, it is precisely a kind of fascination with the timelessness and magic of contemporary cities; a fascination with the layering of different cultural or architectural expressions and styles at different points in human history that surfaces.

In addition to Calvino and his atlas of lost cities, Walter Benjamin can also be seen as the compiler of a "magical encyclopaedia".^{^[2]} Benjamin defined the metropolis through a "new" (non-theoretical) way of writing about civilization in his unfinished work, The Arcade Project (Das Passagen-Werk)^{^[3]}, a montage of textual fragments drawn from the past and its contemporary present, which Didi-Huberman called an anthropological topography of the city.^{^[4]} As the title of the collection of texts suggests, Benjamin was fascinated by (among other things) arcades and passages in which the streets merge with the interior. He thought of them as interior boulevards, assemblages of places, figures and objects where the repetitive and unexpected intermingle, paused dialectical images in which the past kaleidoscopically collides with the living multilayeredness of the big city. In the arcades, people can indulge in activities under an undisturbed sky, in a miniature world of their own without the intervention of the elements. The fascination with this type of environment can also be found in a certain type of flâneurism inherent in Barbas' work.

The above aspect is evident upon closer examination of the themes of the drawings, which combine three key elements: the first is always the space of modernity, the second is the collision of different temporal planes within this space, and the third is the finding of liminality, expressed through a reflective surface such as glass or a mirror. Whether it is the aforementioned bar where the "baroque" stucco ceiling and columns meet a plasma screen, the wooden neo-Gothic doorman with a security camera, or the self-portrait in the Art Nouveau passage. The Néphéli Barbas exhibition can be understood as a travelogue of ambivalent places floating in limbo; an attempt to excursion into the memory of a space that becomes the central narrator of a story. Tiny, meticulously executed coloured drawings on paper are adjusted in structurally sophisticated installations at the intersection of object and exhibition architecture. On the one hand, we encounter bent metal frames, on the other, stained glass display cases, both distantly adopting the nomenclature of mid-century modernism.

The choice of materials is not accidental for the artist - the particular attention represented on paper by the aspect of the reflection of light, the permeation of views and reflections that the artist seeks to anchor in her walks is accentuated beyond the surface of the painting through the properties of the metal and glass spatial installations. The direct lived experience of the verticality of the contemporary city is ultimately inscribed in the format of the small works themselves, whose inhabitants are often abandoned, left to their own introspection or work, lost in the busy collective gaze of public places. Yet even these places often end up seeking private corners in spaces characterized by their permeability and transparency. By depicting fleeting moments, a mixture of experiences, impressions and insights, the artist ensures their permanence and defends against their and her own oblivion, "... because the city and the sky never remain the same."^{^[5]}

^{^[1]} Italo Calvino,Neviditelná města, Prague 1986.

^{^[2]} JM Coetzee, The Man Who Went Shopping for Truth, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/20/history.society, searched 23.

^{^[3]} Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge 1999.

^{^[4]} Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna: esej o spadlé draperii, Prague 2009, pp. 68–70.

^{^[5]} Italo Calvino, Neviditelná města, Prague 1986, p. 124.

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