František Demeter in the exhibition Nothing but Anything explores painting that is no longer a work separate from its surroundings. A collage of partially translucent colored surfaces acts as a boundary that defines the space without enclosing it. Color is both what we look at and what we look through.

Layers of colored paper soaked in epoxy resin with pigments merge with undulating polycarbonate surfaces. The relief and rigidity give the installation its shape and structural support, while the translucency opens up a view into the layers of material and the space behind the work. At the same time, the vertical undulations break the surfaces down into repeating bands and transform the colorful collage into a rhythmic, modular composition. The varying opacity of the pigments—such as bone black, Indian yellow, or ultramarine—determines what remains visible of these layers and the space behind them, and what is obscured.

The installation builds on the neo-avant-garde questioning of the autonomy of painting as well as on reflections on expanded painting, in which the support ceases to be a neutral substrate and the space behind the work ceases to be a mere background. The colored surfaces can also be interpreted as an architectural envelope. In The Principle of Cladding (1898), Adolf Loos describes suspended carpets that define a room much like walls do; the structure that holds them in place comes into his reasoning only afterward. However, these material surfaces are not architectural cladding, but rather a permeable boundary between the image and its surroundings.

At the same time, the installation is created through the reuse and rearrangement of material from earlier works. Each new realization represents a temporary configuration of elements with their own history, not a final state. In places, the almost “plastic-like” effect of the synthetic surface disrupts the notion of pure painterly abstraction; epoxy is not merely a pigment carrier but also alters the way we perceive color.

Curator: Mira Keratová