Preparace ticha
This exhibition featuring three painters—Michal Ožibek (*1981), Aleš Brázdil (*1983), and Pavel Samlík (*1988)—is a case study exploring the state of contemporary Czech representational painting, whose hyperrealistic or naturalistic foundations are gradually transforming into a reflection of desacralized vision and perception.
The connection between the painting and static photography, documentary, or various forms of moving images (film, video) reveals new expressive worlds in the realm of peripheral themes associated with the partial aura of what is seen. Within the pictorial format, the perfect whole is always merely a fragment of an elusive, abstract—and therefore blurred—spacetime continuum, frozen in its constant dynamic transformation. Space—and with it, the figure, the states of objects, and spatial frames—are carved out as sharply focused examples in which the restlessness associated with the mystery of so-called “objective vision” pulsates.
One feels secure in recognizable details. However, when these details reflect indeterminate or anonymous visual sources, a chimera of anxiety creeps into the image—anxiety stemming from one’s own sensory experience, however beautiful it may be. The gaze quietly seeks in what and why it might anchor its experience. The painter and the viewer, following in his footsteps, jointly explore the illusion of frozen space, as if anatomically examining it in terms of the principle of its phenomenal essence, as well as in its spacetime deformations and coloristic shifts.
