Habima Fuchs / Matter in Eternity

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.

Habima Fuchs / Matter in Eternity

21.02.2024 - 04.05.2024

Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Šimon Kadlčák

Opening: 21st February, 7 pm

The whirling eruptions of energy discharges created matter by combining particles, the matter grew in volume and increased in size, filled space and started to produce shapes. Shapes of all forms and sizes were created which continued to change over time. Some shapes appeared unusually unstable, ephemeral and fleeting compared to others, while others in contrast appeared static and unchanging. The truth was, however, that there were also forms compared to which the ephemeral ones seemed stable, and also those compared to which the apparently static ones seemed to be in constant motion. Humans were among the forms that manifested in the course of this process (sometimes it is incorrectly said that it was at the end of it). Like everything else, they were created by stardust, elements ejected from star nuclei coalescing into larger wholes, an expression of a cosmic consciousness that started to explore itself. It seems that conscious matter (or materialized consciousness) predominantly perceives the surrounding world through contact with other matter. Where there is contact, mutual acquainting starts. Matter both reflects and emits light. Since matter and energy are the same,^{^[1]},light has become an extended tentacle of conscious matter. It is no longer necessary to touch directly to perceive, touching can be done at a distance.

Habima Fuchs, matter exploring itself, brings into the light-flooded hall of the Fait Gallery MEM objects, arranges them, divides the space with them, places them into correlations and balances them in a concentrated manner. For her, the exhibition is an opportunity to temporarily pause and fixate the current phase of her personal exploration of the world, as well as to present a fragmentary section of it to others in the form of a spatial record. The exhibition is a moment inviting a break from the usual work routine of kneading matter into shapes full of symbolic meanings, a possibility of reflection and sharing with others. The imagery of Habima Fuchs's works abounds in distinct motifs and associations which she presents to others for free confrontation with their own contexts and subsequent interpretation. In doing so, she trusts in mutual understanding. The roots of the images she works with grow out of the shared mycelium of a "collective information archive": its conscious levels consist of the accumulations of the experience of many generations of human life passed down over millennia in the form of images, books, thoughts and feelings..., and the unconscious ones in turn involve the billions of years of experience of organic life (in forms that people can always recognise but which, given their means of communication, they are only able to express through paraphrasing).

The artist’s current constellation is typified by the geometrical division of a particular space, airiness, leaving room for exploring space through movement, as well as for interpretation. The individually positioned elements create "neural nodes", local clusters of artefacts that determine the final possibilities of the audience's movement through the space. It is the relations of objects in space and its boundaries that enable us to become aware of it and experience it. However, if we want to move through space, we must always make use of its empty sections, avoiding obstacles, bypassing matter. This may remind us of the often neglected and not easily imagined fact that all matter chiefly contains empty space.^{^[2]} It is only the invisible interconnections, the energy interactions between them, that create the ultimate illusion of solidity and stability. The reality, however, is movement, constant rearrangement, processes of birth and decline, renewal and growth.

On a personal level, for Habima Fuchs organizing an exhibition is an opportunity to materialize, or visually invoke, an affirmation for (re?)establishing balance in no less than a cosmic sense. Balance implies symmetry, and symmetry implies a balanced symbiosis of birth and decline, a unity manifested in two ways. This is the principle of eternity, and we are matter, i.e. energy that rearranges itself, at one time it is this and at another time it is that, sometimes it is "big" and sometimes it is "small", sometimes its transformation lasts long and at other times it is hectic in nature, and despite the illusion of exclusive individual existence, only reciprocity (consisting of unique elements) is the continuous interconnection of everything in the spatial and temporal sense, of what we understand as “the world”.

^{^[1]} According to the equation E=MC².

^{^[2]} To be precise, it is 99.9999999999996 % of empty space compared to the proportion of matter constituting an atom.

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