Petr Demek is carrying out a thoroughgoing inventory of himself. He is remixing his existing works, generating new ones, and placing everything within the auto-referential framework of a bespoke graph he has created. This graph is a kind of manual to understanding his work as artist. The exhibition STATUS 1 at NevanContempo Gallery is a utopian attempt at communication between the artist and the viewer.
Demek hails from Prešov in Slovakia. He studied in Košice and later in Brno. He has been exhibiting his works since 2001, not only in the Czech Republic but in group exhibitions in Italy, Germany, and Belgium. He has had around ten solo shows in Brno, Liberec, Zlín, Opava, and Jihlava. The exhibition at NevanContempo Gallery is the first opportunity the Prague public have had to see his work on its own. Demek’s creative origins go back to his studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts (FaVU) in Brno. In 2006, he graduated from the Jan Ambrůz sculpture studio. This perhaps explains his sparse, almost minimalistic form, the accent he places on the materials used, the range of which is carefully chosen, and his preferred colour spectrum. Over the fifteen years he has been an artist Demek has generated a highly individual language, the code to which was for a long time the artist’s secret.
2011 marks a turning point in this work. It was in this year that he subjected both his life and work to a searching analysis that, given the identity of investigating subject and investigated object, possesses a hint of the pseudo-scientific. So what? Everything is permitted in the world of art. The outcome was a graph in which Demek attempts to find a terminological framework for the limits of his form and content. The graph first accompanied one of his exhibitions at the solo exhibition STATUS 0 at the TIC Gallery, Brno. On the one hand we can regard the artist’s gesture as a retrospective auto-analysis of his own work, something that many artists have experience of. At the same time, through the dissemination and application of his research outputs, Demek is striving for purposeful communication and play with the audience by lending it a helping hand in respect of the interpretation and partial comprehension of his ‘abstract’ sculptures and objects. The didactic openness characterising this endeavour places it on the level of institutional criticism, or perhaps (to draw on Thomas Wulfen) Betriebssystem Kunst (art’s operating system).
The theme of Demek’s most recent exhibitions is no longer the object, though this remains present, but the invisible web of relationships between objects, their individual aspects, between the artist and the viewer. Time plays an important role in Demek’s work. On first glance the largely static objects contain an element of temporality or the potential for movement. If movement (or time) is not present in the object itself, the artist adds it by means of the context of the exhibition presentation. The opening of an exhibition by Demek tends to be accompanied by a series of short micro-performances. In the presence of the invited guests, the artist finalises his work, usually in the form of minor details, a kind of Barthesian punctum of his objects and installations. This might involve the addition of a small item, the reinstallation of part of an object (some have a joint or other mobile part), a short kinetic ‘event’ that takes place once during the opening and thereafter disappears. Even these micro-performances can be interpreted within the context of self-referential, institutionally critical tendencies.
An interesting aspect of Demek’s exhibitions is the installation of a work in the backroom of a gallery. The artist invites the viewer to participate more actively in the presentation of a work by means of the absurd voting for one of four mysterious objects. The exhibition STATUS 1 is imbued with a duality of antithesis. Despite all the conceptualisation it remains very physical. Decmek’s objects are static but contain the dimension of time, and if we pursue this to its conclusion, the artist’s didactic endeavour to systemise and orient the way his work is perceived by the viewer means we will always confront the fact noted by Barthes, namely that in the artist’s game with the viewer, though the artist plays first violin, the last word always belongs to the viewer.
Milan Mikuláštík
