DESTINY
2015
Solo show at Galerie Edouard Manet
Curator: Lionel Balouin
Text by Michal Novotny

<At first it feels like corporate settings.Transparency and reflection of the glass, coldness and roughness of the brushed steel, tubes of dailight color temperature, carpet absorbing the noise. Everything means something and something has occured, everything means something and the meaning cant be blurred*. Titles such as Destiny, Oportunity, Flexibility, a declaration or a philosophy, unsteady meaning but obvious connotation.

Destiny includes forms we see secondhand, it is a citational fabrication. But it is a recognition, that is disturbed, not due to a bad imitation, but because of a certain shift. Initially functional elements of office and indoor public space design are treated as parts of digital collage. Arbitrarily combined, selected, copied and pasted, cut, multiplied. No regard towards practicality, price or production methods. The result is flawless what concerns its structure and surface but feels unreal. Is it rather a perfect scale one model or a prototype. It loose all the everydayness and utility and with it also its materiality. Thing became a materialized image. We do not use, but see, but feel. These feelings I am feeling*.

But the disturbances also avoids the attempts to grasp, categorize and integrally perceive this item. The object is somehow overwritten, inscribed. The flatness of the vinyl label creates another layer of the image, a sort of graffiti, stressing its surface. Language and symbols, alongside with other forms, materialized or in different states of representation float in a weightless state flooded out of the chain of meaning. The reality of the thing is furthermore shattered by its physical perforation. Holes, symbols of lack of existence or missing unknown parts. But also the necessity to insert. Cropping, slicing, moving, selecting,erasing. Mental, virtual and material operations. Thing-in-itself and abstracted form but nevertheless inside of a web of meaning. Empty but never devoid of content.

Constant switch between familiar and unknown creates a certain parallel reality or rather an utopia. State similar to realistic dream or altered state of consciousness, apparently real, but with details and elements, that leads to something uncomprehending. Empty or maybe actually deep speeches of the comics figures, things, that resemble something but remains alienated.

Disturbance however doesn’t appear only on the level of the function and setting which certain form associates, but also in the dimension of time. Alongside losing and emerging comes the motif of obsolence. Whether we related to the thing because of its functional or formal qualities, the obsolence in both cases makes the thing to lose its meaning for us, as the application vanished. It is this secret and uncertainty which finally makes the thing speak to us, asking for a space to exist.
Or maybe the loss of my own subject face to face with a thing that asks for its own existence undetermined
by utility.>

Michal Novotny

* Pet shop boys. Everything means something from the album Elysium
* Pet shop boys. We all feel better in the dark. Album: Alternative