The exhibition’s title Stable Collection of Unstable Moments denotes an essential dissonance present in Bartal’s works. They depict unstable moments of collapsing entities, portraying a failure of a moment where the whole reality can crumple in no time. Indeed, time is an essential element in Bartal’s works, and his relation to time is multifaceted. In addition to the strong impact of discrete moments, some works are based on cyclical movement, detaching them from a specific time and place. They present meditative movement, which huddles into itself and within itself sustains different mechanisms of disruption: textual disruption, spatial disruption and cultural disruption.
Although full of playfulness, this exhibition enfolds suspended violence, which is camouflaged by deceiving aestheticization. The sense of violence is also manifested by the presence of cultural coercion and various forms of ordering. The unexpected combination between a violent reality, ironic and humorous, places the works between the contemptuous and shameful, the heroic and full of pathos while slipping towards the pathetic, banal and unrealistic.
Accepting the possibility of liberating freedom leads him to an ironic look at the pompous efforts invested in the various mechanisms that characterize the media and technology-based society we live in, to produce meanings which he sees as empty of content.
Text: Yael Eylat Van-Essen
Curator: Jan Van Woensel
Ladislav Sutnar Gallery
February 23 – April 2, 2022
Photography: Martina Havlová
Design: Dayana Grigoryan