Opening: 30. 6. 2022 at 18:00
Exhibition duration: 1 July 2022 - 11 September 2022
Curator: Peter Megyesi
Alžbetina 22, Košice
The exhibition features elements of the author’s painterly, object, and intermedial work, highlighting the phenomenon of illusion, the plausibility of mediated information, and the limits of visual media. Vaitovič’s paintings often create a sense of questioning the confidence in the certainty of that which is seen, and in a game with the viewer, reveal that looking isn’t merely a physiological act but also a culturally conditioned concept.
The exhibition's title, Dva dé a pol (2D and a half), invokes that Vaitovič explores the borders between areal and spatial depiction. The author moves in the space in-between, in which he demasks, names, and deconstructs tricks, conventions, and paradoxes of depiction, enforced and commonly adopted while creating illusions. He brings subversive elements to the apparently unproblematic relationship between reality and its representation while limbering up situations with the viewer’s expectations of obligatory visual effects and depicted strategies and their program disruption.
In this immersive situation, we are confronted with an illusionary environment consisting of a myriad of singular realistic depictions of reality which, in combination, create false perceptions. A detailed map of the room is not the room itself. Its shift into a different space – along with movement, ruptures, multiplied viewpoints, and combined perspectives – causes the viewer to move through a room which in many ways disrupts and disorients, namely due to a surplus of information and an inability to find a privileged place of observation where the resulting collage would be pieced together into an expected painting.
The painterly portion of the exhibition explores the main paradox of painting – the ability to represent. While viewing the paintings of Vaitovič, we are incited to ponder reality and the always surprising viewing experience, so in one instance, the arrangement of the pigment on the canvas reveals itself to us as a familiar shape that we categorise and assign to objects and spatial relations. While developing the compositions, the author concentrates on this fleeting moment and dares the viewer to notice it and not overlook the process of perception as obvious.
Expectations, mapping and schemes, and models of predictions in confrontations with reality often fail and reveal themselves as inaccurate or even misleading. Presently, we experience this sensation, particularly when considering the prevailing prognoses of global warming and the ecological crisis of the past, which, today, appear and blunder as overly optimistic. While working with products of nature, Boris Vaitovič refers to the ecological aspect, where, however, revelations of lived illusions and deceptions are not merely the author’s ironic commentary on our apparent certainties and lived convictions – he directly touches on the tragedy of the human fate and restricted way of life that lies in a soothing delusion and illusionary certainties.
Peter Megyeši
