April - May 2010
At first sight Milan Salák’s exhibition in the etc. gallery could seem
as a fairly simple and immediate variation on the pop-art aesthetics of appropriating
the “low” art production which by means of advertisements, illlustrations and comics
and other media has spread through the visual awareness of the human culture
since the beginning of the 20th century. Author himself surely does not deny this
source of inspiration, he is constantly fascinated by the production of this art
semi-world in a boyish fashion and even the title of the exhibition immediately refers to it.
However this seemingly simple formula contains in itself a rather complicated structure
refering to the basis of what we today call a “picture”, both in the framework of art
and the whole visual culture alike. Besides, can we deny that these repeating shapes
of pin-up girls have their roots in the late-renaissance theory of proportions, or that
the melancholically reclining nudes of soft-erotic magazines have their
great-grandmother in Giorgione’s Venus?
Picture in its traditional task of representation represents figures in a given composition,
which with help of certain artistic means express via their look and atributes a certain complex
of meaning. That is how we know “picture” from the art history and that is how even Courbet
or Balthus worked with it. The common erotic themes, which we can find in their works turn
to both directions of representation. We can understand them in the concrete sense, i.e. as
standing in for a primarily erotic content, using the originally sacral art composition schemes.
Or we can see them as higher meaning structures mediated through this libidinal stimulus, refering
to the “after-religious” issues of philosophizing Western thought. The role of the author’s personal
relating towards the pictorial space created by him as well as the whole system is not
insignificant. Milan Salák presents in his exhibition project for etc. gallery such a “traditional”
picture, in the above sense. The contemporary art theory and practice rather intensively deals
with the issue of picture (image) with its many media and technical peripetia of today. Salák
has a specific artistic attitude connecting the very intensive and richly structured conceptual
thinking with the classical painterly and artefactually oriented picture art basis. He has
previously been trying to solve this problem in his projects, even though more from the
artefactual point of view. In this installation he returns to some of his older painterly
projects in which he worked with the motive of representation, its power, commercial and
identity-building aspects, and connects both the above points of view. The picture has from
a classical point of view often been defined by its frame, which even today is still one of
the targets of the conceptual analysis. This frame is represented here in the sense of the now
so typical formalisation of context as an “artistically” rendered holder of the projector.
The fact that our picture here is not a picture in the classical painterly sense, even if
the form of its visual look always refers to it, creates a strange tension between the picture
“perception” and picture “artefact”.
The same ambiguity is offered to us by what the picture
represents: two young provocative women with a small child. We have a choice. We can relate
the certain inappropriateness of this represented situation either to the tradition, i.e.
as a kind of visual apocryph, or to see the picture as a projection of two “layers” connecting
the traditional inappropriateness of an intimate bodily belonging of two women with an even more
inappropriate presence of a child. The child is evidently the most substantial motive here,
a kind of actualized “baby Jesus”, which can among others remind us via its innocent and yet
inappropriate presence of the position of the author himself. Through transfiguration into
his childish innocence he comes closer to the phenomena of the surrounding world. Removed
from the traditional construction of conventions he is searching for his position in the world
in this semi-space of pictorial plane. Both the position of himself and the picture.
Viktor Čech.
Viktor Čech
© 2007, etc. galerie
Kateřinská 20, Praha 2, Czech Republic / info@etcgalerie.cz
