STROM ART GALLERY, BRNO (CZ)
Never has been an exhibition at Strom Art Gallery as blatantly minimalistic or rather reductive as current project by Jana Bernartová with the title full of promises: Red Like Ferrari. This special hue – rosso corsa – has been used for the infamous Italian racing cars since the nineteen twenties. However, the author is far from working merely with the visual attractiveness of red colour or with its globally effective marketability. On the contrary: she focuses on uncertainty and instability of a specific colour determined by particular technical conditions, individual perception and physiological prerequisites. She showcased the discrepancy between the virtual existence of a digital – blue, in the given cases – colour and its material forms, already during three exhibition projects this year: Liquid Crystals R0G0B255 (Plusmínusnula Gallery in Žilina), Default Settings (Altán Klamovka Gallery in Prague), and Ultramarine Extra Blue (Kaplička Gallery in Jablonec nad Nisou).
An important element, present in the work of Jana Bernartová as a long-time constant, is the principle of a mistake, a popular topic in contemporary art, of course. The author is mainly tracking the mistakes in the digital world that we tend to perceive as an ideal artificial entity superior to human abilities. In this sense, she questions the techno-optimism as a major ideological concept of the twentieth century replacing faith in God by above-personal validity of exact technical sciences. This hope for ideal social order is already outlived, but what remains from that concept is the belief in technological progress, which is still the prevailing driving force in contemporary neoliberal society.
A surprising dimension of author’s approach is scientific thoroughness, with which she pursues the chosen topic; obtaining related research papers and creating a solid theoretical base, which she is not afraid, however, reduce or ironize. In her previous projects, Jana Bernartová was dealing with the colour blue, as the “primary” colour of digital era. The recent shift expands her scope by a notion of historical legend and addresses also the motives of analogue times.
The almost baroque opposition “radiating versus absorbent” is still valid, no matter that the author intentionally does not apply any historicist, iconographic or psychological interpretations. But what appears in the “media sea and its fragmentation” as undeniable, is that the denoted, i.e. the name of the colour in the sampler expressed by a bunch of letters and numbers, is the only ingrained reality. In other words: the denoting gains absolute grounds over the denoted, which appears to us in a Mephistophelian manner in many different forms determined by nothing but the means of mediation: in one case is “the default colour codified in sampler” nested in a digital space, in another in a laser beam, then in the wall paint, or in print. In every case it is different – the set of denotations is overfilled. The usual „what you see is what you get“ didn’t ever apply then, and it never can.
