Ludwig send the kit

In his work, Břetislav Malý has been consistently dealing with questions pertinent to painting, the reflection of the nature and structure of the painting medium – questions which he subjugates to both strict, almost philosophical analysis and liberal, playful commentary. In his older paintings, he analyzed the possibilities of the painterly medium to depict optical effects and the characteristics of the effects of light and its refraction. In the newer paintings, Malý has been preoccupied with the basic painting element, that is, color. Color (or pigment) as the fundament of the painterly medium has worked for Malý as a bridge between the seemingly purely abstract visual morphology towards more conceptually oriented understanding of paintings in which the notes and stories of late Wittgenstein’s color theories are reflected. For Wittgenstein, it is not colors in themselves that stand in the centere of his attention but the way in which we speak about them, the language games we play with them. The issue of chromatics cannot be solved in the field of psychology or physiology but falls within the sphere of natural language since it is models and ways of handling reality through language that are decisive for the dealing with it. The exhibition in the White Pearl Gallery elaborates on this game through the medium of painting. Břetislav Malý creates a complex gallery installation in the gallery space in which he understands painting as a space medium. It is not a conversion of painting into object but painting itself, the most immediate structural element of the canvas, understood as a tool with which three-dimensional space is handled. Space, be it understood constitutively (as the constitutive element of the handling of paint) or as an end in itself (as a mimetic effect of the color composition) becomes as subjects which enables to articulate the theses of self-reflection (not only) of Břetislav’s painting. Three deconstructed paintings-objects fill the gallery space. Structural groups of each painting are decomposed into newly defined chronology, reversed ontology, or a new order which lays bare the borders of hitherto free movement. In this presentness of the constitutive elements of easel painting’s edges (the stretcher – the canvass – the painting), its former functions are made more obvious. The new order rids them of their older context which is laden with traditional, automatic expectations, and rehabilitates our sensitivity towards the construction and morphology of painterly composition. „Flag“, „curtain“, or „screen“, transcribe the flatness of easel painting into creased and overlapping compositions. A kind of landscape of time and space is simulated in the creases which creates a gap in the assumed image continuity in a sort of an anagram, so the origins that constitute painting are disclosed, which tells us much more about color than shape. These landscapes also hide the secret of the series title which reads “Ludwig has set off the kite.” The kite in our hands is white and has a clear rhombic shape; once it is high in the sky, it becomes just a black dot. In a similar way, painting (as a process), which is predominantly distributed over Malý’s canvasses in one prevailing color, takes up new chromatic qualities thanks to its landscape-like undulation. Earlier, in the easel painting genre, these qualities in fact simulated landscape, they worked as a window into a fictive, diegetic space of the image’s world. Paintings placed in space are framed by four circular canvasses. A circle, the most elementary planar geometrical shape, also one of the topics of the medium’s self-reflexivity and an analogy to its constitutive conditions, gesticulates Břetislav’s installation as the issue of painting which, although it works in spatial dimensions, is not necessarily expanded.

Pavel Kubesa