Sternberk Contemporary

From October 3, 2024 to December 31, 2024

Andrej Auch, Concha Martínoz Barreto, Radu Belcin, Chiara Calore, Matouš Háša, Ruprecht von Kaufmann, Enrico Minguzzi, Flavia Pitis, Rony Plesl, Nicola Samorì, Richard Štipl, Attila Szűcs

The surface of a polished obsidian. An artifact interconnecting cultures, ages and dimensions as an interpretive key. The abundance of a metaphor applied to a selection of works by authors associated with the Preparing for Darkness project. Mirroring on the surface and in the depth. The darkness of the grotto as a condition or starting point for an enlightened reflection. All this displayed by „Mirror Noir.“
Lukáš Koval

(...) if you should choose to take a mirror and carry it about everywhere. You will speedily produce the sun and all the things in the sky, and speedily the earth and yourself and the other animals and implements and plants and all the objects of which we just now spoke.”

Plato, Rep. 596d-e

In his search for the truth and within his systematical campaign against sophists Plato strictly refused the mimetic arts. He declared the mirror to be the main instrument of its representatives. By discrediting the mirror as a kind of instrument of purely phenomenal world the mimetic part of arts has been thrown away as something completely false and socially subversive. Although he didn't succeed in his efforts, the shame of yain falsehood did cling on Plato's mirror perfectly. It could be said that the whole history of art theories is either an effort to clean this instrument or a kind of search for its substitute. Long time overlooked chapter from the 16th century can afford both.
Trying to communicate the spiritual beings, only few decades after the genocide furor in the New World, the neoplatonic thinker John Dee and his spiritual medium Edward Kelley were laboring with an obsidian artifact brought from Mexico. Fascinated by its alleged magical power they promoted the enochian experiments and boasted about the smoky, black mirror. The transfere of its original cultic function amidst the setting of Christian hermetism opened up the way from the surface to the depth. An ordinary mirroring was no more the sense of watching into the obsidian circle, rather the dis- covery of the space behind it. The self-observation was replaced by the self-knowledge and the later one by belief in the possibility to overcome the bounds of a simple perception. The seen one was replaced by the revealed one. Dr. Dee's mirror material was spewed out of the Earth's depth. Its darkness belongs to the protoorigin. Through the detour the Aztec instrument brought man back to the place from which Plato took him out. To the cave devoted to the myth and mysteria. Black mirror became synonymous for the renaiss ance of Dionysian principle in the shape of private practice. The cave was replaced by the studiolo - grotto and the group experience of the cult by the individual experience of melancholic sentiment of the thinker - creator devoted to his soliloquy.
The works of artists connected with the Preparing for Darkness project contain a lot of mirror polemic. Those are not the hyperrealistic images of the surface, rather a kind of the pictorial metaphysical analysis. They resign to the sharp light of the imposed truth from outside and align with the opalescent reflections of the dark period mysteria caves. Because the light spectrum can obtain its full power only on the background of such a darkness. Against the light of the reason they stand „the light of the sensual view". They create the new mythological narratives promoting the tradition of Jena Romanticism poetology. They revive the classical iconography themes. Though not giving up the rationality as such they deliminate its space by raising the „poetical persistence" principles against it. Their works are not the subject of something seen, but of something revealed. In some of them one can see the amorphous phantasms or simulacres of the black surface or mannerist grotto walls. The other unveils the protooriginal structures on the basis of the microscopic insight. Some are intimately self-investigative privatissima with the hint of melancholy, the others keep the heteronomical distance of the object explanation. One is traditionally shaping the materia spewed out the earth, the other is balancing on the edge of optical possibilities of the usual materials and techniques. But all of them are bound together by the principle of the black mirror - mirror noir.
Lukas KOVAL

Curated by Uwe Goldenstein & Lukáš Koval

Sternberk Contemporary Hlavní náměstí 92/4
785 01 Šternberk . Czech Republic
Contact: sternicon@gmail.com

images from the show: