Jan Poupě / Set of Views

The events that are present in Tomáš Bárta's paintings take place between two spaces and the partition between them. These pictures inevitably set a "backward course" through the history of European painting, all the way back to Leon Battista Alberti’s reflections on the construction of pictorial space which he incorporated into his seminal work De pictura (1435). However, instead of a well-organised renaissance arrangement, Bárta offers us more ambiguous spatial relations and a spectral illusion of the objects inhabiting his paintings, as if architecture produced its own ghosts.

Jan Poupě / Set of Views

09.12.2015 - 21.01.2016

Fait Gallery Preview
Dominikánské nám. 10, Brno
9th December 2015 - 21th January 2016
Opening: 8th December 2015 at 6pm
Curator: Jozef Mrva

Photo: Marek Mičánek

„By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a "logical two dimensional picture." A "logical picture" differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor - A is Z.“

The statement above by Robert Smithson can be included in the set of views that can interpret the work of Jan Poupě. Jan Poupě creates imaginary architectural designs, which either arise from a vacuum, float in emptiness of the monochrome background or respond to the virtual undulate surface under them. His large canvases are a play with the representativeness of this type of the logical image, but do not refer to any particular place. They are plans that deny their own utility, they are created for themselves, they are plans-for-plans. Plan becomes a medium - in its tautology it is caught up, sketched and radically completed until the very end. Poupě then constantly amends these proposals, each additional picture refers to the previous with the intention to be better. But the result is not a linear development towards the best possible outcome, the apocalyptic ideal. His creative process is not the work of an engineer working with the assignment, but of an artist, who disassembles it. He creates a set of views. With every next picture this set expands and contains more and more different approaches, mutations and views.

The actual set of views can be understood in two ways: First, as every conceivable position of the viewer whilst looking at the picture, when passing his insidiously constructed paintings, therefore, the physical act of observation connected with the movement of our bodies in the space in order to get the ideal field of view. This viewer’s point of view Poupě likes to use in paintings that have perspective moving outside their own area, which is uneasy for the viewer and forces him to subconsciously follow a point that has vanished. Or the set of views can be a metaphorical move of the mind across the picture, sliding on its surface and beneath it, looking for interpretive keys and presumption about the hidden parts. It is a movement of imagination, the inner desire to convert Poupě’s pictures into Google Street View and see all the corners from the level of an imaginary pedestrian. Both of these sets can continue indefinitely and they become parallel to each other and in their connections and combinations there is born an adventure for the audience that is a worthwhile experience.

Jozef Mrva, curator

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