01 Dec 2010

Jiri Svestka Berlin presents Jaromir Novotny

The Czech painter Jaromir Novotny (born 1974) will present his newest works at the Jiri Svestka Gallery Berlin. The exhibition entitled Visible Paintings will be open to the public from October 30th 2010 till January 8th 2011.

The presentation of Jaromir Novotny's paintings at the Jiri Svestka Gallery is made of works
created in 2010, bringing two series together: Vertical Group and Visible Paintings. While the first group concentrates on a more formal composition, the second group is centred on a detachment from the image itself. The result is a more radical approach, dissolving both format of the picture and its colour. As Novotny writes:

On this background, the paintings 'reveal' their essential properties, whose values reach slightly above zero, i.e. cross over the boundary of visibility. These include a limited range of colours which seem to arise from white only, as well as the depiction of the surface of the painting, which appears to be only just detaching itself from the surface of the canvas, as if it were some kind of initial 'motif' of the paintings itself, appearing almost to blend both with the surface and the format of the painting-object.

The colour is therfore on the borderline, both in its (non-)visibility as well as in exeeding the format of the picture itself. In and outside the frame, the composition may continue on the side of the picture. Variable framings of the image thus displace the natural border of the work (the format) beyond its limits, alluding to the third dimension of the painting.

Being aware of the 'picture as a thing', as an object, breaks with the notion of the aural work of art. It is the artificiality of the painting, the fact that it has been ‚manufactured' that engages Novotny, bringing out an oscillation between coincidences and formal decisions in the painting process. Working within these parametres includes accepting mistakes and random results that form a single whole, a point of view that distances Novotny's work from traditional Minimalist paintings. By making the painterly process accessible and transparent, the works gain a 'functional' aspect.

On the side of the composition, verticality and scale of the works remain constant parameters in relation to the perceiving viewer. This puts the human figure in a 1:1 proportion to the painting.

A minimal mutual differentiation seems to be a general and basic process here, on the backdrop of which it is possible to materialise � or at the very least point to - certain variables of time and space and in particular their resultant phenomenon - a place. Standing in front of a painting, I sense the existence of here and now with the awareness, however, that 'now is the inner image of the past' (W. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk).