This exhibition project, presenting a selection of the works of leading Czech artists from the younger and middle generations, tracks the triggers of human emotions, the points at which they penetrate human perception and are, for some compelling reason, a moment of resounding uncertainty. What are the strategies contained in a painting in this sense? What certainties do the artists call into question? And why does the painting of today have the ambition of “mending” the spectators’ vision, correcting their passivity, or just irritating them overall? These are the questions that the exhibition Mechanisms of Imagination attempts to bring up to date, to reveal, and to highlight.

Reality does not change, rather it is sensitivity (possibly the degree of sensitivity) to it that becomes different. It is specifically this primary relationship that is of a transformational nature, and it is reflected in the language of present-day painting, which in no way has rejected depiction. However, in spite of the seemingly traditional means of expression that it uses, it provokes the spectator to think about what the painterly portrayal is realistically representing and why. It could be said that this is a breaking down of the representative elements through playing a critical, or ironic, game with the genre. Ultimately, this does also contain certain characteristics of representation, however, these are not systematically or institutionally embedded. Instead, they are given priority at a level of variable identity – an identity that expresses the complex relationship contained within the field of discourse between the one who formulates a work of art and the one to whom it is presented. This field of discourse may contain all accessible cultural heritage as well as the most current technical and technological means that construct an entirely new horizon of cultural civilisation and overwrite the old one. This is why, in the act of depiction, present-day painting modifies and, at the same time, unmasks the standards of the human point of view in relation to the automatisms of perception. It captures the space that exists between seeing and perceiving. For instance, it reflects, interprets, and possibly ironises reproduction media and the processes of empty reproduction, which merely recycle and cosmetically complement a world of modern gardens of paradise, icons, and idols. Today, it is possible to use digital manipulation to produce any sort of image made to order. However, this opens up the space to undermine this method of “production” and its cynical consumption.

As a traditional expressive medium, a painting undergoes self-reflection – in relation to its own history, as well as in relation to other, more dominant types of visualisation. It is, to a certain degree, a type of living relational subset, which integrates within itself (and also exudes) a broad range of impulses. In the same way that a plurality-based culture works with open scenarios, where work in progress is crossed-out, over-written and extended, and in which, during this never-ending process, there are several various views of the same thing offered in parallel, the painting of the present day is an open platform, which, like a scenario, develops in relation to the moving “processes of discursivity”. Now, more than ever before, a painting, through its constitution, comes much closer to this state and nature of discursive, or open, dialogical thinking. Visual formatting is close to the form of “text in progress”, which is just in the process of being formatted or “is formatted” on the basis of certain facts and their modification. In the case of a unified painterly expression, that moment of work in progress contains references to the openness of situational results (Roubík, Polách, Czesaný), or, in the case of processual painterly constitution, it refers to the open search for painterly articulation itself (Sedlecký, Pitín, Basjuk).

Jonáš Czesaný works with the semantic transposition of concepts into visual situations. A part of these “transcriptions” is the artist’s ironicising inquisitiveness, which sets the imagination in play even where we would hardly expect to find it. Thus, the difference between Identity (2017) and Consistency (2017), both expressed by the same opened laptop, lies in the manifested relationship between colour and non-colour. Whilst Identity uses the black screen and keyboard to refer to the complete sameness that exists in relation to the all-consuming black hole into which human time disappears, Consistency uses a bright, rainbow-coloured screen to evoke in the spectator the artificial joy ensuing from virtual unification (social networks). At the same time, it also ironises the emancipated and non-physical satori of abstract tendencies in painting, which make an unauthorised claim to “pure” and unburdened expression. The painting Chocolate Factory (2018) is an illusionary game, focusing on human vision as the goal of manipulation. It is as if Czesaný is hinting that, in those places where painting is “imperfect”, digital tools are thorough. Whilst Configuration (2014) depicts symmetrically arranged gymnasts, which, through their harmony, are striving to realise a totalitarian scenario – representation through the “ornament of the masses”, in his Constellation (2014), the artist uses this seemingly banal scene of a flock of pigeons paused in motion, and a fabular structure as the basis for ironising the concept of everything that is termed as “social”.

In his paintings, Miroslav Polách bases his work on perfect expression through painterly illusion. His “descriptiveness” once again updates all available formulae and experience with handling paint in a way where the result is as convincing as possible. We are able to sense that, behind the present-day scenes, there lies a starting point in photography as well as exceptional knowledge of the painterly iconography of the past. For instance, his painting Synergy (2018) presents a scene of resting restorers wearing work vests, as if it contained a distant reference to the motif of the Mount of Olives. Here, a declaration of “collaboration” is moved into the current day and associated with a rest after strenuous work, which truly conserves the past and maintains it both for the present day and the future (restoration). Polách often works with allegory. His Bohemian Outsider (2016) is in ironic portrait of a contemporary Czech composer (Martin Hybler), who is resignedly lying on the instrument of his fate – on a piano, or more precisely beneath its lid. In a similar manner, his The Extras (2016-17) depicts a church functionary resting on a church pew – with his hand propping up his head, an open book resting on his stomach, and his discarded “sports” shoes on the floor below him. The inappropriate elements that Polách uses in the detail overturns the perception of the entire image, transforming it into something of an encoded riddle, or encrypted quiz. The detail may even be an expression of a current, irrational felling. Two such examples are the strangely puffed out draperies in the painting Body Dreaming of a Dream II (2016), or the drapery/figure sitting on a bed in The Hotel Room (2015).

The transformations in the framework of discursive culture, possibly comparable to a labyrinth, are reflected in Daniel Pitín’s paintings. The artist found film and film aesthetics to be the most appropriate tools for capturing what is constantly being constructed in order to remain in operation and, at the same time and in parallel, immediately sinks into a dimension of time and memory, which both enter into the construction as destructive elements (disassembly). More precisely, he discovered these tools in all that film leaves behind in addition to the film itself, namely literary themes, screenplays, photo documentation, archives, and other such things. Film is a time format that is composed (edited) using the logic of the storyline. However, Pitín formats his paintings in contradiction to this logic, or even against it. He integrates several levels of time in his works simultaneously: those that he takes over and recycles, as well as those he includes as projections of his own identity (Adéla, 2014). Film provides an ideal foundation because it works with artificially constructed time, while simultaneously storing it as a false memory. In actuality, everything is fake – the protagonists, the sets, the plot, etc. – with the exception one very important thing, specifically the emotions it evokes. From the very beginning, the structure that is laid is one of mystification, but, at the same time, it also carries and stores specific contents, that is to say, the experienced material and mission (Secrecy, 2009). This forms the basis for Pitín’s visual poetry of utopian and absurd in-between spaces which give an architectural form to a specific feeling (Growth, 2017). It is an unrestricted game with the subconscious that opens Pitín’s live dialogical field between film, documentary, and painterly visuality (Flashback, 2015).

Zbyněk Sedlecký places emphasis on a painting as an autonomous, long-distance, depictive level, which he uses to unify various situations and events, whether or not they have anything in common. The suspended structure of the painting sharpens only that which can be unified as a phenomenon. This approach lies behind a painterly effect known from the Impressionist period, when a change in the distance between the spectator and the painting plays a role in the unification or the decomposition of the visual whole when it is viewed. In the artist’s most recent paintings, there are often random situations from urban exteriors (Untitled, 2017). A few examples include images of working moments, break times, empty pavement tiles, embankments, etc., or anonymous figures in street attire or work clothes, who are making some movement that is not precisely specified (Bent Over I and II, 2018). It is as if the staffage filling the urban space bears within itself fictive memories. The paintings much more evoke an intense feeling of some sort of unavoidably intrusive melancholy from the passage of homogeneous time rather than the totality of a specific situation (Resting, 2018). They are mere triggers, entrances into the unified windows of imagination, and into random moments that have no historical value, but merely repeat themselves and thus establish themselves within their own “physical mass of time” as variable constellations and configurations that are played out between the spectrum of light and shadow (Vest, 2018).

Ondřej Roubík uses portraits to thematise the actual movement of the psychic aura that consistently surrounds and accompanies individuals – just like a shadow – both in its isolation and within the context of any social contact. Here we find explanations of various moods, in which a sense of introversion and self-absorption are dominant. Externally, just a mere game of subtle gestures discloses the nature of what is happening inside the portrayed. In some cases, the model hides behind a constellation of furniture, and the incomplete face is replaced by the manifestation of a hand penetrating the first visual plane (A Modest Nature, 2018). Elsewhere, the face is entirely concealed, and the most striking element of the composition is a surprisingly colourful abstract stain in the real visual plane (Trik, 2018). Whilst the painting Veronika (2018) could not be more of a civilian portrait with regard to either expression or description, the work entitled Youth (2018) works with abstract constructions of allegory and ciphers, where the artist places two figures, apparently a couple, in the wasteland of a frozen landscape and, on the head of one of the portrayed, places a covering in the form of a crystal.

Ondřej Basjuk has turned painting into an instrument of inverse adventure, which provokes and irritates. The artist immerses himself into the canons of depiction, analysing them, and taking them apart. He reveals and bares the principles of visual constitution, brazenly publicising the painterly mysterium. He shows the reverse side of painterly rhetoric, which acknowledges the tricks and lies it intentionally uses to deceive whoever is looking. However, this in no way means that he does not take the image seriously. Whilst he undermines and demolishes painterly effects like outdated theatre sets, he creates new relationships within the context of visual formatting. The human figure is no longer staffage, or the measure of a representational scene, but it is a bizarre comic element of overall visual demystification (A Rainbow Snake Beyond the Wall, 2017). By reducing colours to black and white and grey, his painting come closer to the illusion of documentary photographs, or scientific illustrations in old books. The artist builds in a similar way on the contrast between elements and forms (The Power of Brown, 2017). There are no explosive devices falling on an idyllic landscape, a sort of anonymous Arcadia, in Basjuk’s Bombs (2018), but rather something that is reminiscent of “The Nothing” in the film The NeverEnding Story. Here the nothingness/emptiness is expressed through a collapsing black and white flat surface that is tumbling down onto an elysian earth out of an aeroplane. In the painting Panzerparade (2015) the artist presents a kinetic report on the current political tension that is heading our way from the East. In Three (2018), he works with a game of self-portrayal and the continuous repetition/mirroring of painterly motifs. Basjuk deconstructs the erroneous or calculated interpretations of myths, in order to bring into the present day the vivacity and the aliveness of meta-narration.

The Mechanisms of Imagination drive a wedge into the certainty of the most perfect technical visuality and simulation, drawing attention to the fact that, today, digital imaging can be used to transform and change anything. However, these are only technical games that mystify and change our perspective of everything that has thus far been known and close to us, and they prematurely enclose us in a circle of the false certainties of pseudo-recognition without any physical verification. Conversely, painting is a physical intervention into the state of things and hypotheses. It returns the vertically disappearing “discursive nature” of culture back into real time, back to earth, and reintroduces human benchmarks to it.

Petr Vaňous, Prague, February 2018