Evžen Šimera approaches art very much as a scientific discipline. His paintings do not depict reality, and nor do they narrate any stories. Rather, they present results of experimentation with technical potentials of painting, based on the artist´s conceptual reasoning and never ending endeavour to reach beyond the conventionally defined borders of painting. Everything began still during his studies at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, when he invented his own individual painting technique which he named New Dripping. He then created geometric figures, using drops of paint in conjunction with the effect of gravity force. This early experiment, which he demonstrated among other platforms in the final round of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize contest (2008) and at the exhibition After Velvet in The Golden Ring gallery, made him known to gallery-goers in whose subconscious his name soon came to be indelibly associated with the notion of paint drop. By now though, Evžen´s interest in this particular format has begun to slacken. Gradually folding up his Dripping canvases, he sets out on a new journey, asking himself, “Where has the art of painting evolved, at a time which has witnessed elsewhere the morphing of a sculpture into an object?” He finds an answer in defying the constraints set by the picture frame, to engage with an innate sense of purpose in a systematic work aimed at deconstructing painting by breaking it down into individual elements: material, process, presentation, and perception. A central part is again assigned to the medium of acrylic paint which he now modifies by chemical compounds, obtaining a new type of art matter and form. Thereby, he stretches out the scope of a painter´s work to the borders of alchemy, adding a mystic element to his scientific approach to creative work. “I am fascinated by alchemy, a discipline which, like art, would transform originally less valuable substances into rare materials,” says Evžen, who was first advised of his alchemical tendencies by the art historian, Milena Bártlová. There, for the second time already, he unwittingly finds himself within the context of the work and approach of Jackson Pollock. While formerly his drip painting actually represented an antithesis to Pollock´s Expressionist-style sprayed and torn paintings, his current inspiration by alchemy relates him to a source drawn on freely by Pollock and more than a few other artists.
The keynote of the latest series of his paintings, on display on the second floor of the Old Town Hall, which is simultaneously the practical part of Evžen´s doctoral thesis in Federico Díaz´s studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, is then the act of painting as such. While devising new working processes involving the use of chemical substances, he produces works which bear evidence of the existence of recently perished objects. The display of these bizarre “neoplasms”, as the artist calls them, opens with an amorphous stain guiding us to the accompanying sounds of crackling dry ice, towards enigmatic Threedimensional Negatives of an Object, bare plaster reliefs whose mystery resides in the incommunicability of defunct states of matter. The processes of breaking down paint, as far down this time as the seminal form of pigment, and inducing an explosion with the aid of compressed and supercooled air, eventually produce expressive pigment stains called Oxide Oxide. This central element is flanked by long-exposure photographs capturing the Spirit of Matter, i.e., the process of thawing of the impermanent object made up of acrylic paint and dry ice. The photos evoke the presence of a long-disintegrated entity, attesting to the transience of things and states – the unavoidable Vanitas.
Though the series shown here is the result of a rational, investigative approach to art work, it can nevertheless induce in the spectator´s mind the idea of a story involving something that was once experienced or seen, but that has been long since forgotten. Works with potential archetypal or religious connotations “represent some sort of window into the past,” notes Evžen who, notwithstanding his otherwise unreserved reticence towards storytelling, has at least for this once made an attempt at bringing across a message that gets very close to being narratively specific.
Text by Monika Čejková
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The text was published in The Spirit of Matter catalogue.
Curator:
Monika Čejková
Full exhibition.
22/5–7/7 2013, Prague City Gallery, Prague – Czech Rep.