VIDEO NoD: Štěpán Kubík - SCN/GRP

Video NoD
Štěpán Kubík: SCN/GRP
panoramic 360°projection
Curator: Veronika Zajačiková
April 27 - May 26, 2017

On the new elementarism

One of the most obvious elements of Štěpán Kubík’s latest work, SCN GRP, is a moving dot, which traces its white path over a black background. It’s so elementary that it cannot be narrowed further. It moves without beginning or end across the gallery’s four walls, like a never-endingly emerging narrative, and generates a reflection on geometrical forms – triangles, squares and circles – that the white tail seeks to complete. Kubík delivers his testimony at the very limit of the bearable, accepting only generic symbols. It’s as though he wishes to revisit the current, saturated language of the unbounded digital image and pare it down to its simplest form – thereby giving it a new grounding. He suppresses illusion, excludes colour, rejects storytelling, cancels all references beyond the established abstract language. He finds himself on the verge of emptiness, from which simple geometrical forms permeate, temporarily connected to their positions, where the expected completion is continually constructed. Their size, thickness, speed, direction and duration are all random, autonomously generated without external input. An important aspect of SCN GRP is permanent change. Whenever it stops for an instant, an inadvertent composition appears, sometimes bearing even the signs of some kind of order, which the author seeks to avoid by emphasising his own flow of patterns. He feels closer to the streaming world of lines that endures within its borders, which are seemingly defined by the gallery’s dimensions but can also be projected in many other spaces. Kubík penetrates a realm where meanings have not yet crystallised, into a sort of pre-semantic vacuum, which the creators of digital images were quick to forget. He returns to the elementary alphabet of expression as to a productive source, renewing the visual impressions that are saturated by the surrounding smog. SCN GRP draws freely on the early abstract cinema of the 1920s, which produced simple, rhythmically alternating lines and surfaces, limited to basic geometric shapes.

The dark space of Kubík’s current installation is slowly filled with triangles, squares and circles. The expected completeness of the shape is a boundary, limiting its existence. As soon as it achieves its target form, it disappears, turning into corners, segments and lines, falling apart to reappear in a different place, in a different size and thickness. Kubík is interested in the singularity of moments, the unrepeatability of impressions, the immediacy of self-generated assemblies, which never return but always offer a new “configurative” connection, unpredictable by the human mind. Kubík remains on the edge of the iconoclastic. Through digital imagery, he renews the effect and strength of elementary shapes, which had almost lost their Platonic character. He investigates repressed areas of experience, related to the primal nature of the sensory.

Kubík’s work SCN GRP may be closed onto itself, as though it didn’t need a beholder, but it’s not just a hermetic cosmos of internal variables. It projects, applying itself to the human body. The connection to the viewer’s feelings is expressed by its name – which was not as randomly chosen as the author suggests. It’s about the relationship between the brain and the senses, particularly the areas that affect our immediate bodily feelings. SCN is the medical abbreviation for the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the part of the hypothalamus that secretes GRP – a chemical that triggers specific fleeting feelings, such as itchiness. This transmission captivates Kubík, recalling the Czech pioneer of the Theory of Excitement, Vilém Laufberger, who published in 1947 a now forgotten “textbook of physiological behaviour based on a new theory of memory”. Though SCN GRP surprises by its expressive assemblies, it’s not just an aimless play of shapes across the room’s four walls, but an effort to embed them in the viewer’s subconsciousness, interacting with his feelings through the endless criss-crossing of parts towards a predetermined role, which only comes together in the mind. The purpose of SCN GRP lies in the openness of its own course, in an endless state of “construction”.

Karel Srp