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5 to 12

Galéria P. M. Bohúňa, Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia

2018

solo exhibition

curator: Marianna Brinzová

The exhibition project titled “5 to 12” presents a series of latest works by Marek Jarotta that build up on his pervious exhibitions titled “2050” that were presented at the HotDock Gallery in Bratislava and the Industrial Gallery in Ostrava (curated by Marianna Brinzová). The “5 to 12” exhibition presents further progress in the artist’s work that is based on the theme of “non-places” that Marek Jarotta has been developing since 2013. In 2017, the artist comes with a visually and formally different grasp of the theme. His deserted “non-places” suddenly become hybrid, overcrowded environments where the travellers get lost in the spacetime.

In his current work, Jarotta keeps focusing on his research of the so-called transit junction places – “non-places”, such as halls, platforms, stations and others. He keeps constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing them endlessly. He changes the character of these environments while referring to reality and virtual simulacra that keep multiplying, layering, overlapping, appearing and disappearing endlessly. His “non-places” have no identity, history or time period, but they are associated with commerce, circulation of passengers and merchandise. They are waiting rooms and gates that meet us on a daily basis on our way from point A to point B. Their universal, but also diverse quality is represented in the formal part of his works.

Today’s transit environments are becoming more and more hybrid and it feels like time flows through them differently as well, sometimes faster, sometimes slower and sometimes it freezes. Marek Jarotta’s paintings reflect this fact as well. It allows for the figures of modern travellers and nomads to emerge as unidentified units in a pulsing and changing system. The pulse keeps slowing and accelerating. Slowing and accelerating… Stopping and resuming… It is not clear to what degree these passengers are (here and now) present in this reality and to what degree the environment has absorbed them on different levels and transported them to another place. The overcrowded environments of the “non-places” refer to our present as a time of dynamic migration, hybridisation and shattered perception. They make us focus on the present state of our current reality – “hyperreality” that is oversaturated, accumulated and on the verge of exploding. It is a period of non-stop acceleration, oversaturated with a quantity of (dis)information, waste, ballast and we are not able to fully comprehend it. We get lost in a web of roads and endless options and not just in the physical world. 

The artist also uses the painting medium to respond to the matter of tangible versus virtual environments and the possibility of blending these dimensions. The influence of these “realities” goes beyond the medium of painting as it also affects intellectual levels as travelling and transport are not done just physically today, but also virtually. Marek Jarotta uses his paintings to depict a sort of a virtual smog and a resonance of environments that serve as a proof of over-saturation, but also fragmentation of our world and its forms. His works look at this matter from a specific, painter’s point of view. His pantings blend various perspectives, layers and architectonical fragments that deny the logic of the real world’s order. Parts of figures emerge from the complicated spaces while crossing unspecified time zones and then they disappear again. Human presence and its trace is thus trimmed to anonymous fragments of bodies that keep endlessly moving as ghosts between the spaces. They have nothing to do with authenticity or individualism, they are just a distant memory of their uniform presence and “impersonal human system”…

Marianna Brinzová

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Space is only a noise

m++ Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia

2012

solo exhibition

curator: Mária Janušová

Marek Jarotta (1988) study in last year on Academy of Fine Arts and Design in painting studio mal+by (Mgr.art. Klaudia Kosziba, ArtD.). During study he gave his attention to  display movie scene by expressive saturate colourity, as if was transform from television screen to canvas and creating „image into image“. He adopted movie language by application camera scanning and cut in his work gradually, what him stimulated at last with space as such, without figural representation.

Author’s latest work, where he work with exterior and interior of architectural object, which paint or print as photography, then he mechanically grind away it and mold again by using various of layers whether by adding  new elements, which grid away and so this process of „build and destroy“ continue ( almost infinitely) in various stages. Analogous to middle ages palimpsests, there is mixed game of identity and relations continually transcribing. From sturdy, long durability material of body architecture becoming ephemeral, transient element on interface of abstraction and reality.

He displays „non-places“ in similar way- products of supermodernity, opposite of antropological places, spaces without identity, relation and historical relations, where becoming loss of subject between crowd. They are linked with transit, commerciality and leisure activities and serves to aacceleration of citculation passengers and goods, as are airport’s hall, stations, highway and road communications, petrol stations, supermarkets, hotel chains, camps for refugees, amusement parks,… Human entering into space of „non-place“ is duty free from his obvious determinants. He is becomming only thereby, what he is doing as a passenger, customer, driver. Author dispaying these spaces without figural elements, he focusing attention on non-places itself, as spaces annonymous, depersonalize.They was absorbed by solitude, which themselves specify. There is arrested time and activity, there stayed only noise.

Mária Janušová