March 23 – April 21, http://nod.roxy.cz/en/
At first sight, I encountered strict black and white abstract shapes on canvas and smaller, almost monochrome paintings with line patterns of applied paint. The whole space was permeated by a steady ambient-style music reminiscent of a science fiction movie soundtrack.
The second room of the show located behind a separating wall contained a lonely laser printer on a pedestal illuminated by a spot light and speakers – the source of the sound. The soundtrack seemed to be a combination of electronically generated synth sounds and the amplified humming and clicking of the printer going through its moves in test mode captured by contact microphones that were mounted on it.
After inspecting the printer installation, I returned to the brightly lit room with the painted canvases. Now I noticed the thin grey stripes between the black and white areas on the large paintings and the grey floor of the room. The grey color connected the paintings to the floor. The floor connected the front and back room visually. The sound connected the rooms aurally. The steady nature of the sound also found its counterpart in the steady repetitive lines out of which the paintings consisted.
There was a hint regarding the actual relationship between the laser printer and paintings in the press release, which noted that Vlcek uses archival photographs, “scanning and printing them using a laser printer.” The text did not explain what kind of photographs, but it did provide the missing link by elucidating the function of laser prints as an intermediary step in the creation of the paintings.
Putting these clues together explained some relationships between parts of the exhibition, yet the exhibits themselves remained mysterious. The irregular yet geometric shapes came across as a kind of industrial Rorschach tests: Were they blueprints of machine parts? Or material leftovers after some industrial process? Or segments of a test pattern? The smaller paintings (not pictured) on cardboard could be more readily related to the sound in the room, with their monochrome overlapping lines and curves reminiscent of sound spectrograms. Yet this put them at a bigger distance to the printing and painting process originating in photography that the press release mentioned. Some mysteries are destined to remain mysteries…
The individual exhibits of the show fitted together in a machine-part way: Each had some function. Their relationships could be guessed through observation. What they do and how they originated remained obscured.
