Prague City Gallery, Old Town Hall, Old Town Square, Prague, May 13, 2009 – Jul 26, 2009
Filip Černý is a young emerging Czech artist. ‘Videoart’ is his solo show on the 2nd floor of the Old Town Hall, a gallery space managed by the Prague City Gallery.
The first impression given by the exhibition title seems to be that it operates in a simple descriptive mode – videoart in the same sense as painting or sculpture. But that is a mistake. For Černý ‘videoart’ is much more than a description of the medium. On the contrary, it is the departure point for a complex array of subjects. Černý tackles problems of representation, media, technology and their impact on the viewer. He is working in the medium of painting, yet his paintings refer to non-painterly realities. There is an illusion of space, yet it is not a threedimensional perspective space. It is the layered space of virtual environments and digital representations of reality – of media which exert oneself as more real than real.
The viewer watching the out-of-focus image of a forest expects that the auto-focus function of the camera will ‘correct’ the mistake and deliver the ‘reality’. Yet it never happens. This is a painting. The time is frozen still. We are caught in the timeless space of our doubt. We can feel the proximity of the ‘real’ yet we cannot get hold of it. The auto-focus is broken.
Other paintings are of the ‘layered’ kind. Like a pseudo-spatial simulation in Photoshop. The space is palpable, yet it is not there. What is ‘infront’ and what is ‘behind’. What is a ‘real’ photo and what is shaded vector? One painting takes this questioning even further. Two depictions of light switches on canvas are cut out from the canvas and pasted next to the canvas in one row with the ‘real’ light switch. A row of five light switches emerges. One is ‘really real’ two are ‘really’ painted and another two are shadows left behind in their outline only. The transition from ‘real’ to ‘virtual’ is complete.
The upper room of the gallery is used to represent one single project – the walls are covered by 19 round-shaped paintings of buttons/nipples. All of the paintings have exactly same dimensions and compositions. They differ in the nature of the depicted nipple. The high number makes them look almost like the buttons of some mysterious machine. Or as a personal information database. Bodies as parts. People as parts. Inventory. Repetition. Pleasure. The connotations are multiple, yet they all converge on the broad array of contemporary corporate media and representations of reality, in this case representations of the human body.
Černý’s work is thoroughly based in our experience and the reality of media – mediated reality. He is able to get hold of this subject and work with it within the confines of his chosen medium. This exhibition comes as a refreshing surprise, communicating topics which are of general interest.