Ondřej Vinš’s installation, Pedestrian Thing (2018), can – according to the artist – be understood as a “mechanical-chemical record”. However, in reality, this several-month-long experiment, whose name is borrowed from the eponymous collection of poems by Petr Kabeš, bears in itself the inescapable poetry of absurdity. Its resulting format is, from a creative perspective, both subtle and liberating. He unexpectedly paraphrases the finesse characteristic of photo documentation, without paradoxically, during the process of recording individual phases of movement in the landscape, his camera finding any sort of use. The artist applies the technique of recopying sequential topographical situations from maps onto paper, a record of spatial movement that accentuates the materialness of the analog process. He confronts various models of representation: the precision of cartographic measuring against records of sensor-based and physical movements in the landscape. It is worth pointing out that the mapped terrain used by the artist was the beautiful mountainscapes of the České středohoří (Central Bohemian Highlands) area that is so often visited as part of local landscape traditions. It all makes sense: they stand out not just for the two-dimensional photogenic quality of their silhouettes, but they are also suitable for the “pedestrian thing” and because of their multidimensional presentation thanks to their visibility and sparse vegetation.

Topics related to topography, landscape and spatial mapping recur repeatedly in Ondřej Vinš’s photographs and paintings. Each time though they appear in a different perspective representation or with a different content focus. In the series of paintings, A Study of Shadows in Landscape(2013) he captures, for example, the drastic discontinuity of the post-industrial Most area with ghostly images evoking the well-known metastasis; in his photographs though his approach to people in landscapes is replaced by enlargements from the movie, Big Green Line (2014). The current exhibition, Pedestrian Thing, foreshadows his installation, Transitory Landscape (shown at Perla, 2016) and his “landscape” project, I am not at all below the hills to the West (2017) photographed in Norway and Finland.

Mariana Serranova, curator