Future Polis
February 2, 2015 12:00 am - March 21, 2015 12:00 am Curator: Cora Waschke Polansky gallery, Veletržní, Prague 7-Holešovice, Czechia“We don’t know what the future will be like, but I anticipate it will be abstract.”
Vladimír Houdek
Symmetrical arrangements of concentric circles and polygons dominate the dark paintings in the Future Polis exhibition by Czech artist Vladimir Houdek.
The clearly delineated forms are centred before a shaded or checked background of fine pastel lines and take up the greater part of the painted surface. These geometric figures, which at first appear like graphics, present themselves on a massive-looking support. As smooth as their surface may be, the acrylic paint collects at the edges of the paintings, demonstrating with its encumbering weight the objectual quality of the works. The image becomes a panel, a relic from another time.
Counter-posing this perishable materiality is the timeless and universal symbolism of the circle: eternity and perfection.
Vladimir Houdek has long been fathoming the circle; as an element of modernity, as a base for “pure painting,” as an opening-up of pictorial space, as the epic centre of the image composition. In Future Polis the circle appears in the form of concentric discs and spheres. Since time immemorial the circle has governed and illustrated our concepts of the world, whether the concentric circles of the Christian heaven or the orbits of the planets. The alchemist Georg von Welling (1655-1727), referenced in one of the picture titles, sought to express the overlapping of the creation narrative and spatio-temporal dimensions of reality by means of circular forms. Houdek’s images, which combine circles and polygons in relation to a central point, follow thereby the principle of the mandala (Sanskrit: circle), which are intended to make visible the totality of the cosmos and at the same time depict the floor-plans of sacred buildings.
In their sombre and striking, almost poster-like quality, the works in Future Polis are reminiscent of emblems that might derive from futuristic films such as Metropolis (1927) or Solaris (1972). Two major innovations are thematised and developed in these films: industrialisation and space travel. In the future city Metropolis machines run the living environment. In Solaris a planet that enables forces the space travelers to live in materialised memories takes over. In the work series Memory, the re-presentation of the past is depicted in the form of open books and fold-outs. In a large-format painting, that kind of a storage medium of knowledge such as this appears in a circle of radially expanding black-and-white lines. Comparable to a group of works by Francis Picabia from the early 1920’s, (Octophon, Conversation, Volucelle, etc.), classified as “late dada-machinist style,” an optical effect arises through the wavering of the lines that casts the objects into space. In Houdek’s work, subtly nuanced gradations of shading make the floating objects appear three-dimensional. However, apparent light reflections shape and modulate the surfaces and figures in an aesthetic rather than a natural manner. Here, the pictures correspond more to models than to illustrations. Houdek combines their sleekness with surfaces that seem to bear traces of mechanical working and at the same time can be interpreted as stellar nebulae. At this interface the images open up the infinite space of the cosmos in which planets hover, encountering the eye of the beholder like the eyes of an alien power.
Houdek’s paintings unite the materiality of image, the present and machine with the immateriality of illusion, the future and space. Future Polis touches on visions that have been operative at the latest since the emergence of modernity and on the anxieties bound up with them. The conquest of space takes place through machines. The fear of an artificial intelligence turning against humanity persists. Houdek’s choice of a modern, abstract formal language and combining it with stellar imagery seems like a look into the future that will retain its validity permanently.