BECOMING GARDEN…
Galerie Dům / Broumov
17.09.2023 - 29.10.2023
Curator: Petr Vaňous
Conceptual artist and painting professor Miloš Šejn (1947) enters the field of creation from positions that naturally cross the boundaries of traditionally defined expressive worlds. His inner creative engagement linked with a sensitive intuition can be compared to a river bed turning everything into action and process (time format). In the work of Miloš Šejn, even the image, which is essentially a statically constructed medium, is transformed into a processual trace, into a multi-layered record and a multi-significant imprint of movement, which has set out from somewhere, somewhere and for something, in order to integrate into itself the most essential thing that makes a place a place and the situation of situations.
The GARDEN... project presents Miloš Šejn as an artist-operator who ventures into the depths of the natural framework. With the care of a surgeon and the sensitivity of a shaman, he observes and studies the subtleties of tissues and veins that nourish the phenomenal essence of space at a specific time of year and under the conditions of a specific time and climate situation. The act of linking is a method of imitation, an imitation of the natural cycle. The interface between the human body and the natural framework suddenly disappears in favor of an intense presence. It is the presence that is non-verbally thematized here as something otherwise difficult to grasp, leaving behind only partial traces and prints, only fragments of an inseparable whole. Movement is suddenly felt as something that unites and connects hitherto separate worlds and actually re-creates them differently. Figure and place merge. They lack the form of traditional representation, and the form of artistic output corresponds to this. One could think of them as acts of diverse "meeting" or "meeting". Consciousness in its alertness and alertness meets here the mystery of the involuntary unconscious.
The Broumov exhibition is a selection of older and newer authorial realizations-tracks that thematize contact and touch with phenomena that we can boldly include under the umbrella term "garden". A garden is a type of cultural landscape. There are visible traces of human will. Interventions that give the natural framework a practical or aesthetic composition and shape. However, the garden can also be perceived in an extended field as a relational field of memory and its layering, where everything turns into signs and symbols that permeate time, thus complicating their meanings and becoming ambiguous. This is the case, for example, in monastery gardens, whose past is a different kind of present.
Petr Vaňous