Momuments Scanning /
Repeated Record of the Non-repeatable
Zbyněk Sedlecký perceives an image as a relational platform defining itself through permanent movement, change and variability. Painting is not a static visualization formulated once and for all. It avoids totality of one view and one binding message which reflects the use of painterly expressional means. The artist destroys and decomposes conventional reading patterns and tries to pull viewers out of the laziness of their tired view, simultaneously including sight and consciousness. He chooses his themes so that they are clear enough and could represent referentially grasped targets of these diverse entries made by expressive means of painting.
Given Sedlecký’s rejection of creating a picture through definitive, and closed, descriptive form, merely through craft mastery of illusive immitation of what can be seen, and to create “paintings – monuments“, he chooses for his themes such objects that are these monuments or which refer to them somehow. Why? Because they are precisely those
convenient targets in which the inconstancy of viewer and creator relation may be demonstrated taking place in both the different, mediated level (architect – artwork), out of one´s own created picture, as well as directly within it (picture – object). Sedlecký, by borrowing existing objects – monuments, architectures, buildings, pits, interiors – and including them into the context of the paintings, creates an error system, “illusion of reality“, in his visualized word, putting a trap in front of viewers´ sight. At first, he forces his observers to read pictures in a wrong way, as “visualization”, and then to revise and correct them in the sense of this automatism, in its relation to projected icon-object. In this sense, Sedlecký´s cycle of Karel Prager´s architectonic realizations in Prague, featuring New scene, Federální shromáždění and the bank in Smíchov, is very significant. The author works here with various codes and time levels at the same time. He directs this anachronic situation in which the beliefs in the total past (architecture – monument) through the present appear. In respect to the non-physicality of objects in the field of a painting, it rather evokes a space of dematerialized dream, and in-between space, in which he awakens and constitutes memory. The experience becomes an object losing its contours, and disappearing into the fog. It is a kind of monument scanning and its storage into the undefined memory register.
However, another “material” is present here, which must be treated and included into the context. It is human figure, or crowd, in its multiplied form, which may be put into focus
in two different ways. Either it forms a dominant motif in painting, defining its frame, or, on the contrary, it is subjugated to space, defining its borders. By calling his exhibition Staff, Sedlecký used intentionally the variety of semantic connotations of English. The word staff has many meanings such as personnel, community, workforce, but also crew, support, or resource - this is the scale of meanings to determine the human mass that occupies space and forms environment. Sedlecký manages to transform architectonic space of the interiors and exteriors into new environments which, while keeping all anonymity/admission and indefinity/ definity, comprehend presence in its basic features – operation, pragmatism and ambitiousness based on the regulated “flow of the human mass“. As if the space was co-formed by latent legislative means of social practice, and everything else was cast off the record because of its unimportance. It is no longer about the figure as an object, but rather about the “participation” or “attendance“ as abstract phenomena, and the situation of operation and static reference expressing success or failure of some-any action–non-action. The extent of depersonalization represents here precisely the new quality characterizing the anonymous processuality of today. The theme here is the “process in time” itself, in which something becomes extinct in order for something new be born. This interface, the “turning point”, is being observed by the author. He uses this to create, as Benjamin might have said, dialectic image full of formal and referential contrasts. Live picture of exhausted society transmitted live through security cameras. The repeated record of the non-repeatable.
Petr Vaňous
