Curator: Petr Vaňous

Jiří Šigut (1960, Ostrava – Vítkovice) is an author to whom experiment, is an essential aspect of their work. He has been examining for a long time the characteristics of photographic media, which he does not perceive as a methodical, operative and user-defined definiteness but rather as a dynamic and free space for making visible other, often surprising qualities of image recording. This transformative survey, which is mostly of an intuitive nature in order to methodically create a structure and to settle down, is related to the conceptualization and ritualization of the process of photography and its acts. More about the author can be found on: sigut-jiri.cz

Part of Šigut´s work is a radical reflection of the photographic "utility" at the level of expressive and genre interspaces. The connection of photography to the object world is replaced by a connection to processes, configurations and phenomena that reveal not only the very fundamental nature of the reproduction media, but also the general ways of human sensory perception, which is naturally linked to memory, defined by time-space experiences. Such is the case with Šigut´s current examination of digital photography in two levels – in print and paintings on a canvas. It is the digital photography, that through compressive processes, modifies and converts these interspace experiences into a different equivalent of experience. The exhibition SCENIC COUNTER-POINTS presents Jiří Šigut as a landscape painter. The author's paintings from recent years, which have their presentation premiere in Prague, directly reflect the radical compression processes of the originals. Rapid digital compression is dialectically opposed to the lengthy process of painting. The result is a surprising set of constellation phenomena. A theme common to both painting and photography emerges as essential here: the principles of time perception and ways of storing memory. The exhibition will also include the presentation of a new partial monograph by Jiří Šigut (Kant) focused on this issue. The curator of the exhibition is Petr Vaňous.

SmetanaQ Gallery