Jakub Tajovský is one of the youngest representatives of Czech painting. Classical, respected by its audience and collectors, painting remains a highly pursued medium. It is a medium that has long been the subject of exploration, critical and deconstructive analysis. Challenging painting as a medium through the lens of intermediality has become an artistic discipline, with Jakub Tajovský approaching it creatively and inspirationally.
In the early stages of his doctoral studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology, Tajovský's interest in the technological aspects of painting resulted in the development of his own painting material: GLUP. As a polymorphic emulsion, its material qualities can be relatively well-regulated and modified. GLUP can have many colours (here, however, Tajovský deliberately retains a limited colour palette) and viscosity, allowing GLUP to be employed as a sculpting agent. The next step in developing his painting materials was setting up a "Paintbot" ("Malbot"). In both cases, the artist is innovative regarding the technological possibilities of painting. Moreover, it becomes a passionate, polemic dialogue about the medium of painting itself and the myths inseparable from it: the notion of originality, the uniqueness of the authorial gesture, the secrets of the great Masters, etc.
The exhibition's core is the newest version of the "Paintbot", developed in collaboration with PrusaLab, a prototyping workshop exploring the limits of digital fabrication. Privileging the art-making process rather than presenting final artworks was a decision made early on. This decision informed not only the preparations for the exhibition (choosing the size of canvases for the Paintbot, their format and compatibility with the Paintbot, or deciding whether to reveal the technological behind-the-scenes enabling Paintbot to function) but also its final setup. As it is currently exhibited in the Kabinet T. Gallery, the Paintbot is, to a great extent, site-specific. The canvas's format informs the robot's size, which, in turn, is informed by the space capacity of the gallery. Tajovský also accounted for the time aspect of the exhibit – how long will the Paintbot be working during the opening hours and how much paint will be used in this timeframe. While labelling a piece of art as an experiment often comes with derogative connotations, here, we truly are witnesses of an experiment, during which we should embrace a variety of outcomes. The exhibition opening is certainly not an end to the artist's work.
With this exhibition, Tajovský is not merely testing the technological limits of his newest painting robot. He is also exploring its expressive and semantic skillset. The show is organised to showcase the various stages of development and possibilities of 'expanded painting'. In the exhibition's first section, we see the warehouse temporarily housing the artefacts created by the Paintbot. Next to the art materials also used to produce the GLUP painting material, as mentioned above, the warehouse consists of various containers, canvases, and a funnel used during the paint application. The custodians, who are conventionally in the background, supervising safety measures, become important figures in Tajovský's exhibition. In work outfits specially designed for the show, they become, to borrow the official terms of recruitment agencies, the 'production operators'. The second section resembles the production site – half studio, half factory. Here, the presence of the robot moving his 'hand' across the canvas inevitably evokes a factory space with an automated production line. However, seeing the Paintbot using the 'drip technique', which strongly evokes Abstract Expressionism, leads us to perceive the product as something more than a standardised item. In this section, we also see some of the finished canvases; the Paintbot should finish four paintings during the exhibition. Similarly to Pollock's works produced with the canvas laying horizontally on the floor and later exhibited hanging on the wall, the paintings done by the Paintbot are also presented vertically once finished. As such, the exhibition meets, to some extent, the criteria of a conventional display of paintings. However, seeing the paintings hanging on a metal drying rack signals that this is not their destination nor that the painted canvas has reached its final form. The paintings are not autonomous artworks awaiting an audience's distanced reception.
After experiencing the exhibition section devoted to the paintings' production, the final works are showcased to the audience. Before their presentation, moreover, the paintings are recorded by a digital camera to become part of an interactive video installation at the end of the exhibition. This final touch which could be framed as a playful addition, is, instead, essential to Tajovský's work. For, the robotic application of paint is only one aspect of expanded painting. Another is its extension through media which intensifies the shift from individual authorship to the notion of sharing and collective. Here, Tajovský utilises digital tools such as the Expo_dist program, which he developed in collaboration with Jakub Valtar in 2015 as a virtual canvas enabling digital painting. Expanding painting with the help of programs such as the Expo_dist results in intriguing visuals. From my point of view, however, the program's side effects of expanding and changing our ways of approaching the medium of painting are even more captivating as they call for interactivity and spectatorial engagement.
For the exhibition in Kabinet T. Gallery, Tajovský decided to add a new element to his installation: a sonification of visual data. The script written by Tajovský's colleague from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology, Tomáš Hrůza, allows for the transformation of visual data into sound recordings housed in a digital archive. After Tajovský decided for a sky view to be the central theme of the paintings produced and exhibited in the Kabinet T. Gallery, he contacted NASA. He received the kind permission of NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory (Centre for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian) to utilise sound documents, which were the outcome of a project focused on recording the sounds of celestial bodies. Machine extensions of our senses and bodies are thus – with our help – engaging in a dialogue. With the sky being the exhibition's overarching theme, the artist selected something that has always stimulated human imagination, illuminates the limits of human knowledge, and is crucial to the foundation of cosmogony and religion.
Initially, I wanted to write about what comes to mind when I come to Zlín and immerse myself in the Baťa's industrial complex: capitalism. Specifically, I wanted to write about the connections between the Paintbot, art, and 'venture capitalism' with which Tajovský shares an interest in what happens at the borders of systems or issues surrounding performativity. Nevertheless, I believe it is more compelling to focus on a different aspect of Tajovský's work: the significant need for sharing and collaboration, which is vital to the process of pushing boundaries. In contrast to celebrating creative destruction, this need for cooperation should be seen as related to the need for anchoring one's existence in some form of spirituality. A connection which, at first, may seem surprising turns out to be less surprising after all. The American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (which later became the foundation for the 'Californian Ideology') was interested in new media's democratising potential while being underpinned by a passion for building alternative communities and spirituality. In the current moment of a plethora of crises, this passion is becoming a timely topic. While the Paintbot and its works remain in 'their own field', that is, continuing the legacy of modernism, it is enriching to bear in mind that the 'field' is not merely a space of the medium to dream about oneself but also a space where it is possible to dream about what is beyond the horizon or the impenetrable darkness of the night sky.
Jan Zálešák, exhibition curator
The video installation uses sounds from the Sonification Project - Chandra X-ray Center courtesy of NASA/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
https://chandra.si.edu/sound/
