AUTOMATIC VIEW

PETRA STEINEROVÁ & ZBYNĚK SEDLECKÝ

OPENING: WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18TH 2012 FROM 6PM

THE EXHIBITION WILL BE OPEN UNTIL: FEBRUARY 12TH 2012

The exhibition AUTOMATIC VIEW takes its origin from and is represented as a monothatic and focused dialog of two artistic individualities, a photographer and a painter. For both of them, whose work is mainly known for traditional techniques and its qualities, the exhibition gives, one might even say - a possibility to increase the creative approach and drive to more conceptual and systematic way in terms of artists’ methods.

All parts of the project in general could be considered as a certain documentation or transposition of the concrete public space areas in a manner of shooting, framing and seeing. The Emergency exit series consist of ten looks to almost the same parts of interiors in a skyscraper. As of a viewer, he is confronted by empty, substitutive and a bit nostalgic reality which is captured in the most skillful way. The only change he can follow, however outside of the image - is a photographer’s vertical travel within the hotel floors, as if common emergency evacuation was shown. We can see the same precision in a nostalgical ambience of the movie projection Broadcast. It consists of a short of mechanical captures taken every 30 minutes during one day, shot on 8 mm film without using a tripod. Caused
changes of the light, as a day turns to night, throw us back to stereotypical vanity, at the same time camera movement let us feel a spectator‘s attendance. It seems that funnel-shaped symmetry of the building in the middle of a dull observation tries to affirm the unforgettable of the once seen landscape from the position of a viewer.

To look at painting series Squares they remind a sequent overwriting or interpretation of a security camera evidence in a public by traditional media. It is not only omnipresent control and movements shooting that is shown here, but
banal staring out of the window recalls in these paintings. Similar observation of seemingly mechanical production issues to a viewer in four-part series of almost the same images, where we can read an ironization of the quality of a traditional media like painting is. Deductive modernistic composition dominate in these paintings, shown in geometric grid of a pavement in perspective and several cuts in shape of architectural details. Movement of random unknown persons makes a visible change in a clear field of view, as if they don‘t fit there - like random marks in a photographic collage they could be simply removed within this well-arranged map.

Visual compilation of Petra Steinerová and Zbyněk Sedlecký innovatevely deals with an important phenomenon of the observer and observation, as well as with possibilities of the record and all non-figurative complications it may involve, like a balance between intensity and depersonalisation, also automatism and arranging of a gaze or the question of acepted provocation level of the abstraction.

Michal Pěchouček