We got together with Barbora and Julie at the beginning of November so that they could present their concept for Jelení. They gave me a perspective drawing which enabled to see both the gallery rooms at the same time. I’m looking at it trying to tune into the feelings of the spectator who is about to enter the gallery. He/she sees a blue carpet and hears a sound. There are already some people inside inadvertently standing in a manner enabling them to be alone (among the others) with the sound. Before the spectator enters he/she recalls the installation by Florian Hecker Formulation he/she saw in September at the Hamburger Bahnhof, and the way people there were looking for their place in the space; the way they were looking for a point to which fix their eyes, whilst, at the same time, they themselves changed into images in the eyes of others.

I’m trying to imagine the space without people. Both rooms are now empty, the sound is spreading from the right one to the left one (from the first one to the second one). The recording fills the gallery in the same way as the drum beat filled the space of an abandoned factory hall where the sound had been recorded. The sound doesn’t die away, it fills both rooms. It is like an invisible water surface which has risen above the blue area of the carpet. The surface of the sound strikes the surfaces of canvases hanging in the left room in long, lazy waves, even if nobody is looking. Unlike the sound of the drum which died down in the factory hall a long time ago, the color remains layered on the canvas exactly the way Barbora and Julie applied it. One layer of color on top of another spreads from edge to edge. The color lazures fill the painting space, but don’t overrun it; they are bound by the frames which are connected into blocks just like stones in an impenetrable wall.

I’m trying to imagine myself standing in front of this painting-wall-surface. I’m trying to concentrate on the gallery space, about two hundred kilometers from here, and to install a painting there I can’t see and a sound I can’t hear, while letters are spilling, line after line on my monitor, on the white “sheet”. I’m looking at the line with spilling letters and I see zombie metaphors gathering around me with a mutter, like the (Un)Dead from the White Mountains gathering around King Aragorn. Something tells me it is high time to lift my head above the surface and to breathe in.

Jan Zálešák

Media support: Artycok.tv, ArtMap and jlbjlt.net