Past exhibition
Internal Spaces
Ondřej Přibyl
PRESS RELEASE
The exhibition entitled Internal Spaces is another solo presentation of the Czech artist in the FOG Gallery program. This time it presents the work of a representative of the middle generation, a fundamental figure of Czech non-figurative photography. Visual artist Ondřej Přibyl (1978) experimentally investigates objects in their true nature and dynamics. He frees the objects from their pictorial context or reflection of the observed and thus opens up to the viewer a world in which he is allowed to contemplate the inner time and space.
The author himself characterizes the exhibition with the words: “One of the topics I deal with in my work is vision and perception, but more precisely, the impossibility of looking up at the world in one moment, all at once. The fact that the vast majority of the external objective world will always remain hidden to us in the invisible reaches of infinite distances, in the invisible regions of microcosms, just as our reality will always fade away in the passage of time and disappear into the past and only slowly emerge from the mists of the future. However much we enrich our senses with various and increasingly sophisticated extensions, our horizons will expand only slightly as a result. It is far from just a problem of the technical limits of our senses, but rather the very arrangement of the world, its opacity and the knowledge that the true nature of things and phenomena will remain hidden from us forever. We are condemned to only believe in the existence of things and facts we know, unless we actually see them or hold them in our hands, and even then, we cannot ultimately be sure that they really exist. It seems to me that the question “so what can we be sure of” becomes more pressing every day. We live and know only a slice of what we call reality, only the part assigned to us by our material existence. We perceive the space around us as an external space, outside of us, perhaps as an unlimited and infinite. Nevertheless, if we accept that it is also a space firmly bounded by the possibilities of our knowledge and knowability in general, it can begin to seem claustrophobically cramped.
When I talk about internal spaces in relation to cognition and perception, I always mean spaces that are bounded, enclosed and hidden in some way, whether viewed from the outside or from the inside. However, I am primarily referring to mental spaces, i.e. internal by nature and at the same time our most personal, because in the end we actually recognize and distinguish everything there. Because it is at least as much an inward look as a look that always ends hopelessly on the surface of the objective world.
Within the framework of this exhibition, I only very lightly outline several mental models and model approaches to the perceived problem of interior spaces, as a broadly defined topic, which, at first glance, might be better expressed through text than through the often unclear code of technical images. I am convinced that even with the help of the tool just mentioned, it is possible to bring and show something relevant to this topic. It should be exactly what I find difficult to talk about and even more difficult to write about.”
