Abstrakt
"In the depths of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; black flowers bloom in matter's darkness. They already possess a velvety touch, a formula for perfume", writes French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his 1942 book Water and Dreams. Therein he argues that in its attempt to understand "beauty", aesthetic philosophy tends to always look for "form" while ignoring the "individualizing power" of matter itself - the material imagination stemming directly from within. Conjuring a tangible and fluid vision of the world, he develops an understanding of images, however dream-like, elusive or ephemeral, as always irreducibly material: images "have weight; they constitute a heart."
Bachelard seems to have named something we are perhaps only beginning to feel now, as the realm of images, even those once considered to be "virtual", "derivative" or a "mere reflection", roots ever deeper into the quicksands of the everyday. Growing out of this rather changed reality nearly a century later, the work of Nikola Balberčáková and Tristan Gac once more plumbs "the depths of matter" for an "obscure vegetation:" with an unsettling pliancy, like a caramel candy stuck stubbornly between our teeth, the supposedly "imaterial" digital realities glue themselves onto perception and cognition, transforming not only our imagery, but the entire emotional (infra)structure (in)forming who we are and how we feel.
The pencil lines, metal ribbons, wood carvings and frenzied shots in this exhibition make no comment on such changes - they ride them. Refusing to choose between inaccessible depth and impenetrable surface, they move effortlessly across what we once considered solid, joyfully tracing our affective flows across materials and mediums. Beyond sincerity or irony, they smear the oversaturated gloss of the "scary world" we live in with a cheeky sort of smile, which can at any point twist into a grin. It is an inherently soft and hard gesture: cute but toxic, both real and fake - sticky sweet. A barbed wired garden where vine caresses a cold, razor edge.