Artistic collaborators Julia Gryboś and Barbora Zentková have worked with the relationship between painting and other media for quite some time. The title of their current exhibition draws attention to the setting of the painting (i.e. a pictorial work) in an environment that forces the viewer to observ  the work of art in all its complexity. The artists’ earlier work was based on a discursive presumption that consisted of seeking transgressions and limits of painting as a medium. What defined those limits also defined the essential character of a work’s individual components, and was conditional for the concept of the artwork. From today’s perspective, both artists try to challenge categorisations such as “painting and its overlaps”, etc. They believe that a work can today be viewed in a complex way, without being necessarily attributed any such post-conceptual definitions. Shifting and disturbing the boundaries of painting is therefore not among their objectives. The intermediality of expression enables the two artists to approach the “matter” as an open multi-viewed structure. Their intention, however, is to create one complex whole. The exhibition To Hear One’s Own Footsteps amidst the Noise is a set of instructions on how to “stop”. It is a continuous further development of their previous work (for instance the exhibition Chvíle [A While] in the OFF Format Gallery, 2015), where sound and image as such (video, painting, photography) appear as equivalent forms. The surface of the image, depth of pictorial description and time are notions that the two artists consider as fundamental in their work, another important feature being the specific space where the work is situated.

In such cases, it is primarily the sound component that is related to a given space; it arises from the gallery itself, and is presented to the visitor through subsequent post-production as a final musical composition. The two opposite glass walls of the Procházka exhibition hall as well as a part of the ceiling provide enough daylight, and at the same time, they distract the viewer’s attention and encourage leaking perception of the submitted work. Conforming to these specificities the artists have decided to set up, in the gallery space, a kind of territory formed by an extensive painting wall and a sound source in the opposite area. The visitor is invited by the artists to spend a longer time “inside the work,” i.e. in the setting delimited by means of the mentioned media, an almost monochrome largescale painting and a narcotically repetitive musical soundtrack. The absence of narrative meanings encourages the visitors to develop their own narrative. The reduction of forms constitutes a path towards subje tive experience. All this creates an interior “located” space, anchored in time, i.e. in experience representation. One might say, in agreement with Theodor Adorno, that an aesthetically “successful” work of art can also be philosophically-socially truthful, and vice versa. Adorno adds: “Form isnothing but sedimented content.”