The work of Ladislav Jezbera follows developments in the history of sculpture from the second half of the 20th century. He studied under Vladimír Preclík and then under Jan Ambrůz at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology. However, he does not consider himself a traditional sculptor, as he creates installations, objects and two-dimensional works based on the morphology of the American minimalistic sculptors of the 1960s and 1970s. For a long time, Jezbera’s work has responded to the site-specific realizations of artists such as Carl Andre or Robert Morris. Early in his career he also used simple materials that recalled the legacy of the arte povera movement. The galvanizing moment for his career was his questioning of the position occupied by sculpture, which from a certain perspective can be considered an exhausted art form today. His work occupies a specific position in the local art scene.
Jezbera comes from Hořice, an area with a rich deposit of sandstone and
a strong tradition of sculpture and stonework. He studied at the famous Secondary School of Sculpture and Stonework in Hořice and now teaches there. The tradition of well-mastered craft permeates his work and is then confronted with the challenges posed by the educated art consumer and the issues of mass, modern production methods and shapes. Aware of these realities, he transforms them into a basis for deconstructing familiar shapes in which certain geometric, mathematical and physical phenomena are usually analyzed. In the past, the materials he has used for these de-compositions have included, for example, the symbiotic effect of various heterogeneous substances on one another, such as suspending lemons and incising them so that citric acid drips from them and disrupts a surface installed beneath them made of marble tiles (Still Life with Lemons, “RUSTIC” exhibition, Gallery U Dobrého pastýře, 2007).
The artist has also repeatedly deployed a similar principle of material destruction using blocks of polystyrene which he has literally allowed to decompose by exposing them to aggressive air freshener. (He first used this technique for his exhibition entitled “Pre-Established Harmony” in 2003 at the House of Art in České Budějovice). In these projects he has also responded to some historical and social questions; when working with soap powder, for example, he wanted to reference the fact that during the Second World War soap was produced from human fat, while his use of fruit in his compositions was a response to the current excessive overproduction and waste of groceries. From this perspective, his most radical installation is Gold Vein 2002, which was situated in the space of a cowshed. Jezbera essentially realized the installation illegally – from the ceiling he suspended a plastic bag full of cow’s urine, which gravity then formed into a line swinging back and forth. When one looks at the photographs of what is approximately a 40-meter-long line between vanishing points, it must be recognized that in terms both of the gesture and of its use, the material stands up in terms of aesthetic quality. The implementation of that installation involved the principle of process. In his most recent project, Attractor, the artist recedes into the background, as do social-societal conflicts and assaults on our olfactory and tactile senses. A process is playing itself out in the studio, and we are observers of the forms into which that process settles over time.
The title of the exhibition at the Hauch Gallery refers to the artist’s interest in mathematical and physical phenomena. According to the dictionary, an attractor is “the final state towards which any dynamic system evolves over time and towards which it is attracted” – an example is a pendulum at the moment it is tipped from its balance point. In the context of Jezbera’s oeuvre, we can see the significance of this state with respect to the direction of the dimensions towards which his own work is heading – i.e., their situation on the border of a balancing point that is close to a tipping point, the point between order and chaos. This is most apparent in the site-specific installation Anthropic Principle. The composition, made of industrially-produced modules of polystyrene, causes the viewer, from a certain perspective, to experience the dizziness of a fall.
Collapse was the principle of several works by the American artists already mentioned as inspiring Jezbera, such as those by Richard Serra. With his monumental ellipses, the development of Serra’s oeuvre headed from moments of collision towards the disorientation of the viewer, who finds himself in a new relationship with the edges and surface of the work – his gaze is oriented upward as he walks around the ellipse, but at the same time is tricked by the deflection and tilting of the slab itself. Carl Andre, on the other hand, by presenting his works on the surface of the floor, put the viewer into a new position with respect to the horizontal situation of the exhibit. Both artists worked with the non-conformity of the exhibit’s situation. Jezbera develops his own installation on the basis of a similar experience. Anthropic Principle directly responds to the opportunities afforded by the exhibition hall of the Hauch Gallery; his inspiration was the high ceiling and open space of the site.
The blocks of polystyrene that he uses were created by exploding the individual segments inside of forms, and are a visualization of chaos for the artist. “The entire project of Attractor stands on the interpenetration of two seemingly incompatible things, namely, chaos and order. Certain principles here begin in a state of order, but the expression of chaos always enters into them. My constant program is to examine materials that are industrially manufactured or part of industrial processes. Sometimes I am interested in the random processes that occur when steady production processes produce errors and certain externalities come into being that were never envisioned by the industry. For example, in this installation made of polystyrene, I have worked with a certain amount of errors that originated during the manufacturing process, i.e., the materials were not correctly mixed. The production is set up so that compact, rectangular forms are the end result, but because of a certain mistake, a visually interesting moment came about when bright material clashed with dark material and an interesting, organic structure was produced,” Jezbera says of his project.
The other works also involve staged processes based on the expansion of
a mass using gravity. In Attractor, Jezbera returns to Still Life with Fruit, subjecting a massive block of Carrara marble to a test of permeability. Instead of citric acid, this time he lets colored ink soak into the marble. In the beginning, the process is partially defined by the location of the substance, but the actual process of absorption is a spontaneous reaction that retains
a fixed form. This technique was also applied to a series of smaller marble objects, CMYK M, that are not included in the exhibition, but images of them will be possible to see at the Hauch Gallery. Their scale makes it easier to detect attempts to use, for example, the Fibonacci sequence, or an attempted representation of string theory. Besides Jezbera’s way of working with marble, his general choice of material is also interesting. He often selects materials that have largely disappeared both from everyday life and from contemporary art, materials no longer commonly used, and examines the extent of their basic properties. It is precisely the organic structure of marble to which young artists recently have preferred to return. Its structure is becoming a sought-after visual element. These artists work with marble either in mediated form – by transferring its aesthetics into other media – or directly create works from it. Here we can mention, for example, the work of John Miserendino, Analia Saban and Ane Graff.
The stretching of fabric is also the subject of the two-dimensional works exhibited here; in the case of the drawings using pigments, their expansion occurs elliptically. Landscape After I and Landscape After II are returns to earlier works using motor oil. “I first used petroleum in my piece Horizons of Other Landscapes, in which I filled bags with petroleum that wicked into the closed-up fabric. The implementation of that theme came about for an exhibition in Ostrava. It was supposed to evoke the origins of that substance, which comes from the remains of plants. The current piece creates the impression of an almost apocalyptic landscape. Nothing remains after some radical event has transpired – essentially, these are mellow landscapes.”
Text by Monika Čejková
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Curator:
Monika Čejková
Full exhibition
16/9–29/10 2016, Hauch Gallery, Prague – Czech Rep.
