text to the exhibition's catalogue Find Your
Style…
3. 2. 2004 – 27. 2. 2004, Gallery Caesar, Olomouc, January 2004
Two dark grey chairs and the same sofa, both of them heavy like a stone and set on metal legs dwarf as hight seat above visitors’ heads. By their shape, polish and colour they resemble luxury furniture, which invites you to sit down. But their height and hard material (metal, abrasion dust) refuse flatly any contact. Functionally there are not usable, and so as a pieces of furniture receive a nature of fetishes.
The installation Dawn zone (2003) was an impressive entry to the exciting exhibition of Irena Jůzová. Upon this, the author set all of her newest work under the name Find Your Style to present two projects: the above mentioned seating objects (with drawings) as well as large-format digital prints.
At the first glance, the photography may irritate a visitor: a person is confronted with the views to a kitchen and other parts of a flat, almost with some banal advertising pictures from a catalogue. But that is tricky. The photos, which Irena Jůzová chose for this exhibition, seem to be taken from a big picture archive: as the artist possess a catalogue which would be sorted according to the motifs: the most beautiful living, life style, natural experience, travelling; because from this set she chose her pictures. She is occupied with staging photography, which “develops” or constructs a reality. Simulation by a reality or situation happens in the same area, but digital expressive procedure causes also a manipulation of the photography picture.
The next step of stage in Irena’s picture is compositional affinity of photography picture to film stage, which is set in a scene of an amazing, uncultivated, carefully observing dog. The dog is put into shining, pure and deserted areas: polished kitchen, white bedroom and a living room, to a boring courtyard gritted by gravel in the middle of desert and dry landscape. Where is it? On holiday? Or is it a normal working day? In fact, are these pictures banal, or is evil hidden in them? Except of a dog, in the space there are other elements of cosiness: fruit bawls, a threadbare carpet, a soft fur blanket, a vase with flowers and more. The kitchen identity remains to be apparent, but the clinical coldness of chrome furniture conveys in one side a cold beauty, on the other side points at domestic hygienic rituals.
Irena’s works observe aesthetic of advertising pictures and also expressive way of advertisement: shiny surfaces, vibrant pastel colors, large-format pictures – the techniques of seduction and irritation In everyday life we are connected with furniture and architecture signals of various kinds: power, authority, wealth, taste of the owner is conveyed. Here, however, the displayed objects become to be a fetish that is worshiped. Jůzová skillfully juggles with secret meanings and trick, her work is in a state of fluctuation between criticism and hidden joke: trivial, trivial uplifted. A really exciting exhibition.
Hellevi Rebmann