Inversed Romance Bratislava, Bastart Contemporary, 1 August – 9 October 2002; Prague, The 5th Floor Gallery, 14 October – 8 November 2002 Participating artists: Jiří Petrbok (1962), Josef Bolf (1971), Martin Gerboc (1971) Curators: Petr Vaňous, Martin Gerboc The project entitled “Inversed Romance” does not set itself unambiguous aims. It in fact should not even be called a “project” but, rather (and solely), an exhibition. The explanation is simple. The aim of the event is to avoid and refuse – into the maximum extent possible – the desecrated and, in the artistic “operation” excessively employed terms and concepts linked with the “positive and servile language of economy, logics and politics”. If the language is today customarily used in connection with the visual culture of the morphology of calculations, production and post-production and if it is fashionable to transplant the jargon of one field to another and then freely deal with particular meanings, the present exhibition of three painters – Jiří Petrbok (1962), Josef Bolf (1971) and Martin Gerboce 1971) – follows similar strategy (dissolution of meaning), albeit via purely visual means. The essential and productive strategy here is the one of allegory; painting solely embodies a representative situation which attacks a viewer in a subliminal way and works with his immunity and – in the second stage – his integrity. This “situation” develops differently for every person and affects people in various ways. The artist turns into a person that was aptly described by Pierre Klossowski as both experimenter and tempter (Versucher). The painting is transformed into a laboratory which, however, deliberately tiptoes the banality of everything namable and diagnosable. It does not head towards exposing and confirming the one and only ideal, towards something grievously unattainable, and it is far from dealing with some kind of description, let alone mere reflection – it, on the contrary, saturates and multiplies differences that implant a failure into a viewer’s unambiguous orientation. Viewers can be irritated, provoked and tortured by the paintings – hence the title “Inversed Romance” . Petr Vaňous
