A Survivor’s Diary
Petr Dub is a (post) conceptual artist. He systematically examines the medium of hanging painting, or rather the current position of painting. Dub’s paintings are indeed indisputable results of manual, and let us add, often very challenging and sophisticated activity, yet the used verb “examine” is not a meaningless synonym for “painting” in his artistic practice. It primarily refers to the conscious mental activity that precedes the actual process of painting. Petr Dub is also the author of one of the few, if not the only Czech written theoretical study, which reflects the local post-conceptual painting in the context of the current discourse of art. The book, published under the title Selected Post-conceptual Approaches in the Contemporary Czech Painting, was the output of his PhD. studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. Studying in Petr Kvíčala and Milan Houser‘s studio in Brno as well as a one-year internship at the Prague Academy of Arts Architecture & Design of Jiří David and Milan Salák were not in Dub’s case only a formal fulfilling of duties. Petr Dub managed, in confrontation with outstanding, but artistically and humanly different personalities, distill for himself a personal lesson, which forms a compact foundation of his current artistic trajectory. In gastronomy, which was actually the artist’s first career choice, it would be an analogy to the format of “fusion cuisine” combining the strong background of Brno conceptualism and the heritage of Prague postmodernism.
The title of the exhibition, A Survivor’s Diary, offers as one of the ways to read it, a commentary on the current situation. As the Survivor, for the reading subject is kept secret, we may appoint the Painting. The conceptual thinking and painting are in local stereotypes considered to be antagonistic directions. The defenders of paintings blame the conceptual approach not only for “incomprehensibility” of contemporary art, but also from the direct participation in the proclamation of the “end of painting”, which was mainly understood as an attempt to destroy the competition. In 1997 in Prague’s Rudolfinum Gallery there took place a program exhibition focused on the current situation of painting called The last painting. Post-apocalyptic jargon is, since than, a mandatory part of the rhetorical arsenal used to reflect the current status of painting. For Petr Dub, who exists on the tectonic breaking point of two irreconcilable worlds, similar references make flirtatious game. He winks to both sides, but he has already decided to remain single. He acts similarly in his artistic practice. He does not leave the field of traditional hanging painting on purpose. At the same time, however, he applies the strategies that in the history of at least the last fifty years, gradually led to its questioning and rejection. Sci-fi literature works with the possibility of time travel, the intervention in history could change, or rather reverse the present danger. Petr Dub does not seek a revision of history. He knows too much for that. It seems that he rather tries to use the potential that remained fallow in the past on the altar of rapid, avantgarde method. Hybrid status, when an art work contains also the genetic code of its own end and (re) birth represents for us, the survivors, one of the relevant reasons to continue to seriously deal with art.
Ondřej Chrobák
- A Survivor's Diary00:00:03.562
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- The exhibition in the Fait Gallery in Brno called A Survivor's Diary00:00:08.095
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- closes in a certain way the period of my authorial work of the past six months.00:00:15.275
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- It is specific as it continues in the curator's survey which00:00:24.585
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- wasn't carried out by Ondřej Chrobák but by Marcel Fišer.00:00:31.308
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- He came to my studio several months ago00:00:36.567
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- and he started to rummage through my work I hadn't seen for a long time.00:00:40.156
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- Then an analytical part of my work has suddenly appeared.00:00:47.289
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- This work deals solely with deformating squares and rectangles.00:00:54.157
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- At the same time, accenting my older work we went through00:01:01.660
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- a heap which said a lot about my painting style.00:01:05.249
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- This reminiscence together with all what I went through00:01:12.314
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- during the few weeks preparing my preceding exhibition00:01:16.126
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- motivated me to make a synthesis of the two attitudes and that is00:01:19.619
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- the present exhibition about.00:01:28.182
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- I consider the role of Ondřej as a curator very interesting,00:01:35.900
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- because several months ago he got coincidentally to00:01:41.302
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- the installation of my exhibition at GAVU.00:01:46.793
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- The three or four days we spent there meant such00:01:52.969
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- a great humane and professional impulsion00:01:56.501
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- and I wanted to make use of it while this event.00:02:01.467
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- I wanted to ask you how can be the 1960s legacy developed,00:02:05.575
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- at that time the painting became a prospect of another reality,00:02:14.642
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- something like a window to make it simple.00:02:22.786
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- It was replaced by thinking about its materiality and00:02:25.263
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- concern with the meaning of painting and what is it created from.00:02:28.257
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- People started to perceive the painting as a material00:02:34.339
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- and not an illusory matter any more.00:02:37.638
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- It all resulted in a moment when the painting's decline was being discussed in a sense.00:02:39.955
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- The exhibition's name A Survivor's Diary associates a post-apocalyptic vision00:02:49.240
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- of us being in the stage of the declared painting decline...00:03:01.884
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- And everything has to be purged by a blue flame...00:03:09.339
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- Jiří Valoch is standing next to us and at a certain stage of my studies he00:03:13.402
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- worked with all this we have mentioned in a systematic and conceptual way.00:03:20.151
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- At a certain stage of my work I realised it was all data00:03:30.433
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- which are somewhere very far away.00:03:37.576
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- They are defined in theoretical books and exist as a part of the mental space.00:03:40.268
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- We all use and handle the terms believing we understand them.00:03:44.677
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- But I think it is not like that, because over the decades and during their transmission00:03:50.680
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- from one region or country to another one, the terms became very diffused and we are00:03:56.350
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- hardly willing or able to concur in them.00:04:03.747
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- The today's movement means for me everything interesting,00:04:08.456
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- all what happened to painting as a commodity,00:04:12.239
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- although we all know that painting is statistically the best selling medium,00:04:16.244
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- it's a certain cliché which helps to start many discussions and debates.00:04:22.682
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- The theme taking place down there00:04:29.368
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- is a result of my contemplation about who is the viewer,00:04:32.279
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- the distance from which he should look at the paintings,00:04:36.485
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- what can be seen from different angles,00:04:39.585
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- what sort of information the viewer sees after00:04:42.255
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- being informed and without being informed and what can00:04:45.851
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- he associate after a pretty tiring talk of Ondřej Chrobák and Petr Dub.00:04:50.514