Peaceful Relaxing, © Miro Švolík
If you think of a painter as someone who is moved by the picturesque landscape and experiences his horrors and furies in front of a stand in nature or a studio, a palette in one hand, a paintbrush in the other, a beret on his head, and an amusing pipe in the corner of his lips, then Miloš Šejn is not a painter. He is not an observer of the world around him, he is intrinsically his body and intellect both a part and a tool of events.
Miloš Šejn’s intermediate approach includes painting, drawing, performance, conceptual procedures, land art, work with an archive of found naturals, handling of word, photography, sound recording, and new media. He does not paint in a studio; his studio is nature, a garden, a landscape without walls or roofs. Šejn's activity is open to the natural processes to which he tunes himself, listens to them, influences them by his presence, intensity, and the words that come to him. He works on the ground, the frame some paintings get later, and for others it's not at all relevant. He uses his hands directly rather than a set of brushes. Through them he guides the strokes of wood, lodes, fingers, sizzle and drip, the friction of natural and pigments against each other ... The whole body of the artist becomes the instrument of the creation of the work. Words and sounds arise during the creative process, are part of it, as are colors or gestures. The author stores these kind of poems in typewritten notation, some fragments manifested in calligraphic form. Calligraphy is not only beautiful, but gestural, with immediacy, action, movement, and dance. For Miloš Šejn, there is no difference between a record of nature, a painting and a poem.
He, in a creative act, reconciles the visual with the acoustic; the painting is made with the co-operation of multiple senses. Everything we perceive and hear in the landscape, the cauliflowers, the noise, the wind, the gurgle of water, the croon of frogs, imprints on us. The artist also works with his own recordings. The genesis of a work of art and the process of knowing a particular place can be an identical process. Globally, Šejn’s approach could be described as communicating with the landscape.
The paintings bear GPS coordinates specifying the territory of origin of the work. They tend to be popular places in the Bohemian Paradise landscape and elsewhere. Agara is the Celtic name of the Ohře River, Javoří brook can be located in the Giant Mountains, gardens in the Baroque landscape at Jičín. The effect on the landscape, and thus on its articulate record, must necessarily have a time of cyclic as well as fragmentary, natural calendar, pagan and Catholic holidays, Walpurgis Night or St James's Night, farm time of sowing, ripening and harvesting. The artist taps into the primordial, the nature of man-made nature that we suspect beyond the wilderness, farmed and cared for by man. He comes into direct contact with the natural order, with grass, leaves, shrubs, streams, water, stones, hills, furrows, light, dirt, marshes, and forests.
Miloš Šejn belongs to a family of wizards of the Earth, to whom the landmark Magicians de la Terre exhibition in Paris in 1988 was dedicated. For more than half a century, he has been collecting wildlife, making it into an archive, understood as a base, a gateway, a way for imagery – a mental activity in which the clichés of the everyday can be transcended, tapping into the resources inside and outside us that expand the world’s perception and understanding. The process of creation is what it is, and at the same time ritual, play, myth-making, purification, connection, harmony. Physicality plays an important role, knowledge by all senses, skin responsiveness and, through walking, performativity. Perceptions, experiences and visions recorded through painting, drawing, sound recording, photography, video or language form a whole, a single world.
The idea of the whole is influenced by the limits of the human body; Šejn's work is also about finding a line between the body and nature. We are the creation of the earth. She's our Mother. Performance can be understood as a body poem. The body we watch during the event is not an autobiography, rather a gestural and physical mapping. The artist becomes the landscape himself, there is complete identification, empathy, absolute experience. Art theory has the German term einfühlung for this.
The exhibition includes a table, chair and depository. The table does not define where we meet to eat; rather, it is the desk of a scholar, a researcher, something between laboratory and philosophy, pure but experience, and the use of a marked space for observation and thought. René Descartes or Immanuel Kant could have sat at a similar table. On the table, instead of a globe, are a pair of stones, transparent crystal, an enchanted water element, essences of spirituality and pyrites, a mineral as dense and dark as the weight of gravity, the essence of the earth, a symbol of human tools both constructive and destructive. The exposed dead trunk of a lemon tree is not just a found object and a drawing in space, it is tied to the earthly being of the author by time and place of birth.
Moving points of color and surfaces brings video projections of Gardening. The record of the desolate garden seen by Milos Šejn is like a glimpse into the sun, reflections and lights clinging to the algae as loved it by Karel Malich, but also the cycle of nature, the Gardener's Year, portrayed by Karel Čapek. The projection rewrites the installation from the old garden convoys with which we used to irrigate the needed places. The end has years of proven shape and material, a symbol of caring for a land whose moisture we use for ourselves.
We see the landscape and art in a largely contradictory way, art is man-made, nature is not man-made, man is a part of it, his existence rewrites and influences it as much as any other inhabitant of the planet. Nature and art are a common creativity, a movement. Art also functions as a new possibility of man-to-man spiritual touch, maker-to-viewer, for example, through the landscape. The painting is a record, a map, and an aesthetically fascinating new shape. As part of the exhibition, a painting depository is ready for the visitor to leaf through. Through the entrance to the exhibition, we seem to be invited into the artist's personal space. The whole is a visual event brought to life by performance, with Miloš Šejn sitting in a chair at the table.
Martina Vítková
Maple Hill / Giant Mountains 2020, Interaction with landscape performance relict
INSTAGRAM