Rastislav Sedlačík: LandSKaping 2015_2022


Collateral Damage — Rebirth

Szkody uboczne — odrodzenie


Venue: Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej_W Toruniu

Centre Of Contemporary Art_In Torun

Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Torun 87-100 Torun Waly gen.

Sikorskiego 13


Exhibition Duration: 7.10.2022 – 7.11.2022

Curators: Noro Lacko and Krzysztof Białowicz


Instalation: Marcel Benčík, Noro Lacko, Rastislav Sedlačík

Digital support & mapping: Samuel Chovanec

Graphic Design: Marcel Benčík 

Exhibition LandSKaping 2015_2022 (collateral damage) at CENTRE OF CONTEMPORARY ART_IN TORUN is a free re-installation of the exhibition ZA maľbou / Behind the Painting (collateral damage) realized at Považie Gallery of Art in Žilina this year, curated by Noro Lacko and Mira Sikorová-Putišová.

The exhibition will be a continuation of the collaboration with Marcel Benčík and Noro Lacko who will be joined in this project by Krzysztof Białowicz. 

The emphasis of Rastislav Sedlačík's artistic work in recent years has shifted significantly from the plein-air or remembered or constructively imagined record of landscape to a complex polyphonic dialogue of various processes creating a possible image of our visual experience of the landscape - that is, from the record of the image of the landscape to the record of the process and to the manipulation of the process by which the image of the landscape is created. This dialogue involved such variables of the visual environment as the artistic tradition of landscape painting, popularly shared notions of the landscape image, the spontaneity-driven ingenuity of untrained DIYers, the voracious developer's disharmony, as well as the not inconsiderable everyday oscillation of random and lawful natural or social processes emitting growth and degradation, emergence and disappearance. The paintings - landscape constructs were events of urban peripheries, the boundaries of the intersection of urban and natural landscapes, the sites of indistinguishable adherence and wedging of the edges of the civilization-urban and the natural.

The paintings - landscape constructs of Sedlačík's field records and landscaping - took place in the layout of a diagram, delineated by the spiral trajectory identifiable in the title of the current exhibition project: BEHIND THE PAINTING. Emerging from the painting, departing from it, moving in spatio-temporal trajectories diverging from the painting, literally and elementally expanding the painting. From drawings, prints and their hybrids, to objects and post-products, to intimate and more recently large-scale formats and transformations of gallery site-specific installations and time-lapse post-painterly processual collaborations with the forces of non-studio plein-air post-industrial landscapes. Ultimately, however, they have always turned TO painting, drawn attention to it, returned to it, expanding and extending its territory. They converged and flirted with painting.

The visual collision of the planned and the accidental became increasingly important, a paradox that Sedlačík refers aptly to as random order. And here the fatal centre of gravity of Sedlačík's artistic work is revealed: playing and toying with the unpredictable, the random, the incalculable, the unplanned, the uncontrollable. And thus with the intrusion of the real. The temptation of chaos. This has its subject-thematic, but also technological-artistic dimension, that is, it is both what is in the painting and what the painting is made of. Random order is (depending on the occasion, but almost always at the same time) a randomly generated order, an order-disrupting coincidence, as well as a system occasionally (and thus randomly) producing coincidences, or even a system of systematically generating coincidences. The composition on a facade of a night-time housing estate with its changing constellations of the lit and dark windows might be a pleasing illuminative pre-image of this stable Sedlačík's paralogic.  

Playing with the unpredictable and the random, the plan-destroying, the alien, which arbitrarily reshapes one' s intentions or even acts as an autonomous creative force, uncontrollable by anyone or anything, gradually expanded Sedlačík's media scope and allowed him to relax and increasingly indulge in a game with the chance that disrupts or replaces the plan: the moment of inspiration, the secondary use of studio waste, and the moment of a joke as an extension of a line of escape from a rule or a restriction. He entertained himself and evaded the discipline of painting by inventing (im)possible authorial techniques.

But perhaps it was also stepping barefoot on Chaos's tail. He incorporated the principle of random order with his feedback. The reality emerged vigorously and clearly as an inarticulate but intense babel of ruins. Rastislav Sedlačík's entire or almost entire art archive unexpectedly burned to the ground. Only the ruins of paintings remained, from which something new had to be created. The current exhibition BEHIND THE PAINTING is, therefore, in a literal sense, also rummaging through the rubble and ashes left by the paintings. Perhaps it is also a phoenix project. But it is certainly an important reminder that there are situations in life, the most difficult and the most important ones at the same time, when, amidst the rubble and ashes of the paintings of a familiar world, we realise horrifyingly and painfully, but precisely because of that very sanely and soberly, that what we thought was reality were only paintings among paintings, that they were not real paintings, but just paintings, albeit the only paintings we were capable of. But here and now these images have collapsed. They have lost their validity. They suddenly ceased to exist. Reality appeared sharply and clearly as an inarticulate but intense babel of ruins. And we can now speak only in the past or future tense. In desperate, partly futile and partly illuminating attempts at remedial reconstruction or a sketchy, groping designing of something we have no idea what and how it will be.

Noro Lacko

Realizáciu výstavy formou štidpendia z verejných zdrojov podporil Fond na

podporu umenia.