Matěj Smetana
Time from the Outside

The exhibition of Matěj Smetana's new works entitled Time from Outside builds on means used in the past in the animated series Instructions for Use, Factories, and more recently in the animated films The Last Painter and On Building and Clothing, dedicated to Adolf Loos. The central motif of several of the digital and hand-animated drawings on display is the observation of time and the way it is conveyed through the medium of animation. As the title of the exhibition suggests, the passage of time is viewed from a distance, from the outside, from a space that is not verifiable by exact measurements but is accessible to artistic exploration. Although we perceive animation in a similar way to film, i.e. as a record of a smoothly passing time, in reality it is a representation of a large number of static individual details/images/drawings set by their succession into apparent motion. Time, which can be simplistically defined as "a non-spatial linear continuum in which events happen in an apparently irreversible order" (Wikipedia), can also be imagined as a series of moments that immediately follow one another.

The paradox of the relationship between static images and their ordering into sequences and phases whose succession evokes movement and the passage of time has long interested Smetana in animation. The artist also projects the perception of movement and time in animation into the content of his works, drawing on historical, artistic and physical references, with the motif of the inevitable passage of time, aging, extinction, time loop or axis. Just as the conceptual "scientific" level is present in Smetana's works, an integral part of them is also emotion, which is connected with the human experience of time, its passing, nostalgia, the impossibility of turning back time.

Matěj Smetana (b. 1980) has long been associated with Brno through his pedagogical work at the Environmental Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology and in recent years also at the Department of Art Education at the Faculty of Education of Masaryk University. From autumn this year, together with Alice Nikitinová, he will take over the management of the Drawing Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Matěj Smetana's conceptual work is applied in animated drawings, videos, objects and installations, in which the artist often refers to scientific methods of researching and observing various types of complex communication, language or movement systems. In previous works, Smetana has long been concerned with ensembles of signs of language and number series, in which he has tested, through the modification and transformation of individual shapes, shifts of rules and contingencies, disjunctions and returns of content and visual form.

The exhibition will be held under the auspices of Ms. Markéta Vaňková, Mayor of the City of Brno.

photo: Polina Davydenko