11 January to 19 March 2012
Room 10: Jaromír Novotný
Painting from 2009
"The only way to think of the negative, is to think that it is not, and the only way to preserve its negative purity is (instead of juxtaposing it to being as a distinct substance, which is to immediately contaminate it with positivity) to see it out of the corner of one's eye, as the sole frontier of being, implicated in being as what being would lack, if absolute fullness could lack anything--more precisely, as calling for being in order to not be nothing, and as such, called forth by being as the sole supplement to being that would be conceivable, a lack of being, but at the same time a lack that constitutes itself into a lack, hence a fissure that deepens in the exact measure that it is filled." Maurice Merleau-Ponty, quoted in: Jon Bartley Stewart, The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Evanston, 1998, p. 521). Borders and fissures are what determine Jaromír Novotný's
"Transition 1", "Transtion V", and "Access Point 1" paintings. The surfaces of the pictures form spaces of great depth. Due to their scarcely perceptible structure, they indicate a --conceivably slow--movement. They develop on both sides of linear or more expanded caesuras, causing us to divine an intrinsic spatiality. The Czech painter, born in 1974, painted these three works in 2009.
(Artist booklet)
Artist talk with Jaromir Novotny
1 March 2012, 6 p.m.
