Valentýna Janů / Salty Mascara

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.

Valentýna Janů / Salty Mascara

23.05.2018 - 04.08.2018

Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

opening: 23. 5. 2018 at 7 pm

curator: Laura Amann

Hello dear,

Feel free to walk in.

Sit down.

Watch.

Let the sun set on your face.

Everything is in transition.

Light becomes dark.

Your core body temperature sinks.

Words create imagery.

Let the sun guide your rhythm.

You realise the table is a chair.

Or was it a bed.

Can you even feel the frictionless surface?

“Your living room is a cinema.”

It is real but also surreal in its dream-like fluidity.

If you feel like it, think about the following…

Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and sunset with peaches Text > Image > Text

We are inclined to assume that images are by nature static and poetry temporal. Are you really sure about this? Isn’t it so, that all media bear traces of other media and therefore are inherently mixed? Maybe it is more interesting to focus on decoding the precise dosages and ingredients of those mixtures? Think about: What is a medium made of? How do we experience it? How does it manifest itself in time and space? Which main sign system does it use?

Maybe the differences do not always lie where we think they lie.

In this sense it is interesting to think about the way we describe an image. Do you visualise or verbalise? Are you static or dynamic in your style? Do you tend to focus on spatial perception, precise localisations, detailed descriptions and use mainly nouns? Or do you focus on temporal expressions, dynamic descriptions, in short the narrative, and lots of motion verbs? Does it make a difference if the image is familiar to you? And what if somebody else had already described the image to you before?

Ultimately it is your choice how to describe and therefore how to see.

One day, I saw the sunset forty-three times Consciousness > Unconsciousness > Consciousness

When we dream, or rather when we remember a dream we operate at the borders of consciousness and at times in the transitions between waking and sleeping. And though typically thought to be passive and unproductive, the worlds that sleep contains and performs are worlds that inform and influence our waking lives. Though we know very little about why we need sleep, we do know it clears toxic metabolic debris, consolidates our memory and helps us learn and reorganise information accumulated while awake.

So if sleep is a productive mode in itself in a different state of consciousness,

Is it possible that the imaginative labour of artistic practice is a form of public dreaming?

Public dreaming, that allows us to enter a liminal state of emotional transference, where we cannot differentiate intimacy from distance, ourselves from the other and familiarity from reality.

A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn Ethics > Aesthetics > Ethics

If aesthetics has everything to do with sensation and perception through bodily feeling, good design has actually made us numb.

The smooth surfaces of modern design are there to eliminate any friction. Good design has become our anaesthetic, allowing us to prolong our liminal state of unconsciousness into waking ours. But good design was not only supposed to look like good design it was also supposed to make us ‘good’, to give us instant virtues. Good design is our antidote.

All good.

But who are we to need this smoothness so badly?

Your story left me with a bitter after-taste…

I hope your make-up is waterproof.

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