Group exhibition
Mars Uncertainty Index:
Anything that can happen will happen + Anything that cannot happen will happen = Nothing is ever completely at rest
Vladimír Merta’s solo exhibition, bearing the authorial title Mars Uncertainty Index, is paradoxically his first solo show after more than thirteen years of coexistence at Pragovka Gallery. As Pragovka’s most experienced resident, he had to wait for his debut at Pragovka Gallery. It was worth it.
Vladimír Merta is a very versatile intermedia artist who works in closed cycles that he honestly and very sensitively builds on fundamental artistic foundations, which he sophisticatedly moves towards the present. The presented image cycles The Great Energy Scandal and The Origin of the Extraterrestrial are the culmination of his work from the last few years, which matured gradually in his studio at Pragovka. While Origin Extraterrestrial (2020) is a new means in his expressive register in terms of technique, The Great Energy Scandal (2023) is a loose continuation of the cycle The Great Financial Scandal (1992), when he began working with the technique of encaustic.
The intermedia position of his work co-creates the outlines of the generation of artists who entered the Czech art scene around the mid-1980s. At that time, the artist realized land art projects in the landscape and made photographic documentation Něco se stalo (1981), Přerušený proces (1982) and many others. Clay and wood were the basic materials of these works, through which the artist explored movement in time. The culmination of this period was a very daring exhibition in the Na půdě exhibition hall in Český Těšín in 1984. Later, he followed these works with the cycle Paintings Painted by the Wind, which he continued to develop in the new millennium. In the 1990s, he devoted himself to assemblage paintings, objects, and installations that had a strong conceptual emphasis. He combined natural and civilizational symbols with traditional and non-traditional materials, typical and atypical elements. In the following years, he reacted sensitively, with characteristic distance, to the increasing pressure of the world of money and the media, with the aforementioned cycle The Great Financial Scandal (1992), but also with the very radical ready-made installation Public Geometry (1994) at the Špála Gallery in Prague, where, among other things, he installed a complex functional gym on the first floor. Similarly, in 1993, at the Archetypes exhibition at the Mánes Gallery in Prague, he analyzed both the archetypes of the natural world and their transcriptions in the virtual world.
Nevertheless, I dare to say that Vladimír Merta is above all an existential painter, but not in the existential fervor that we would expect from Western-style existential painters, but rather in the position of Eastern meditative nature, where everything must be subjected to analysis and practice, where time and maturation play an inseparable role, and it is in this position that Vladimír Merta’s cyclical works are born. Vlasta Čiháková-Noshiro writes similarly in the catalogue for the exhibition Public Geometry at the Špála Gallery in Prague:
“…with Vladimír Merta, I am still fascinated by the fact that despite all the textual energy, his work can still be deeply painterly, in the consciousness of all this knowledge.”
Vlasta Čiháková-Noshiro (from the text in the catalogue for the exhibition Public Geometry at the Špála Gallery in Prague, 1994)
Just as the author settled his scores in the 1990s with the cycle The Great Financial Scandal, reflecting on the disillusionment with the newly charged capitalism of the formerly totalitarian state, he returns with The Great Energy Scandal, where he very subtly depicts, down to a subliminal level, the subtle body of all-embracing energy that fuels this world on many levels. The fuel provides the flare (again on many levels, including amorous flare). If the fuel runs out it threatens to burn out. After the burn out comes the burn out, after the burn out, the cool down, after the cool down comes the endless night. In the night come dreams of the Alien Origin. Stars are born in the womb of wild clouds. Panspermia skips like unruly quarks. The center of the galaxy is fit for crayon shredding. Black holes from the clippings at the far end spew rainbows. Eaten by a bride stripped by red dwarfs. The third panty is embroidered with the words, “Gender is dead, long live gender.” Someone slowly slides into the library the 1946 title Woman – The Eternal Inspiration of Art by Jarmila Blažková.
Awareness that, on top of all this, Vladimír Mert’s work also exhibits a civic engagement glossing over contemporary societal phenomena, at least in the form of visual metaphor and hyperbole, to which he is significantly seconded by the material execution that everything that can happen, will happen, and everything that cannot happen, will happen, while nothing is ever completely at rest.
Vladimír Merta (*1957) is a visual artist, curator, and teacher. In 1983, he graduated from the Painting Studio of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. At the beginning of his artistic practice, he worked on land art projects, then in the 1990s on objects, installations, and paintings with conceptual overlap. At that time, he also worked as a restorer. In 1998, together with Marián Palla, he founded the Environment Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology, which he led until 2011. He is currently the head of the New Media Studio at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. He is a member of the curatorial group Pragovka Gallery KOLEKTYV and a long-time resident at Pragovka, where, among other things, his latest image cycles Origin of the Alien and The Great Energetic Scandal were created. In his works, he reflects his experiences from outside of the artistic field, which he has been intensively involved in for a long time. These are natural sciences, archaeology, geology, or sound. He has participated in numerous solo and collective exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad and his works are present in many important public and private collections.
Scandals attract much like sugar attracts ants.
Fortunately for us, there is nothing that they do not concern.
The probable is closer to us than the unknown or the obvious.
Melting snow suddenly froze again and we had to crush it with rakes to prevent us from slipping.
The believable and magnificent nature of a picture is its resemblance of something.
Let alone its resemblance of something we do not fully understand.