Place

A bag of gold coins, pineapple and striped stone.

The confined space of the painting has fallen apart, the observer is surrounded by objects and shapes with soft boundaries. Rather than making us view a series of paintings, Robert Šalanda’s latest exhibition entitled Place puts us in close contact with a single painting that draws us into its own concentrated experience of the constitution of the world. The place created by the installation opens itself to the physical presence of the viewer through the vivid brightness of its colour scheme. Visitors enter the painting’s reality without being able to take it away with them, other than as a memory of their own participation in the work. The relation to the traditional concept of painting remain close. Although he may explore the very boundaries of its various forms, wherever Šalanda takes his work, painting is always a part of it. At its core, the installation consists of a series of paintings on canvas where he has constructed worlds with attention focused on the movement of plums, the calmness of a willow or the security of gates. Although the paintings portray new forms, signifiers and objects, the artist continues to build the tension of his paintings with a combination of confident technique and situations with a developed sense for the absurd.

The place created by the exhibition is like a soft bubble with a permeable membrane reflecting distant and unreachable worlds. Yet they are intimately recognizable to everyone because they have been seen, heard and dreamed of in many previous incarnations in the oldest known stories about lost treasures, cities, empires and heroic figures. A gate made of stones is at the centre of the entire composition, although it also notionally collides with the banality of an empty wall. Although we encounter the unknown here, something other, it is at the same time familiar. In this respect, Place is a continuation of the work Robert Šalanda presented at his exhibition Co-extensive in Galerie Rudolfinum. He remains faithful to specific shapes and the works oscillate on the boundary between object and painting. The current show brings an intensification of the extension of the boundary between the surface and the space of the painting, making it possible – without pathos – to also perceive the painting as an object and the gallery space as an opportunity to create a place with painting.

Fictive worlds take on concrete forms here, immediately announcing their presence among physical shapes. In no way does the constructed scene conceal the illusive nature of theatre, manifesting the features of stage sets with enthusiasm, without, however, adopting the temporal aspect of a beginning and end to the illusion created. The element of scenography is evident, yet it does not merely complement, or form the background of, a predetermined narrative. This comes with the involvement of the viewers: in their minds, it may just as easily engender a mysterious rumbling sound somewhere from the depths of the jungle, as the quiet footsteps in the sand of the guardians of a treasure in an unknown cave. The place may also be ruled by the silence of abstract yellowy objects, pineapples perhaps. All these possible worlds adhering to striped rocks, lightly golden pineapples or the guardians of the gate are mutually interwoven, disrupting the surface of the notions of our rational world with their emphasis on its mythical dimensions.

It is all painting and painting thus becomes ubiquitous as a way of participating in the action taking place in the space. Here lies a significant shift in meaning: painting creates the initial situation where the real and fictional worlds interpenetrate. It is precisely the intensity of the experience of the place created by painting that leads us to perceive the reality of space in relation to the presence of other possible worlds. It does not create a concealing pseudo-reality, rather it makes present various layers of reality. One of those may include acknowledgements of possible links to the absurd in the work of Jiří Sopko, regardless of how much these motifs are more likely to appear thanks to the films of Wes Anderson or the novels of Haruki Murakami. Or was this shift in Robert Šalanda’s work brought about by the paintings of Richard Artschwager? The dreamlike work of Giovanni di Paolo? What is certain is that this artwork cannot be interpreted with the aid of linear causality, but rather in terms of networks and layered relations. As a result, however, a more vivid colour scheme resonates here, which does not stop at a superficial gratification ensuing from a brightening of the painting. If the worlds we enter at the Place exhibition and its component paintings harbour a pleasant version of the unknown and the insecure, it is not possible without the presence of mystery and darkness in spite of the brightness of the colours.

One of the merits of Šalanda’s art is a long-term tendency not to simplify the lived world according to pregiven frameworks. For him, painting – whether in its traditional form on canvas or extended into space – is for him always a form of art open to interpretation, and thus to contemplation. That does not mean that it is without its own viewpoint, let alone content. Another way of formulating it is that the complexity of the world appears in the complexity of the paintings. The indefinite nature of the painting contends with the self-evidence of forms, which means that at first glance they conceal the actual complexity of the artworks. Further examination brings complications, however: menacing samurai guardians can become muddled and cute anti-heroes, for example. Yet these contradictory interpretations are not evidence of indecision because they are firmly anchored in thinking stemming from a place unequivocally determined by the painting. That in itself is an expression of a non-reductive view of the world, thus enabling ambivalent positions. It is both a precondition and certainty that we always think from where we are. Here and now this position happens to be the artwork Place.