For a long time, Tomáš Moravec has followed the process of change and its potentials by observing the imprints left behind on material and the environment that serve to mark its developments in time. Although his videos capture an entire action, they necessarily lead to an emptying out of content. The image loses its plasticity. In his video installations, the artist seeks to reinstantiate that represented in the image through fragments, although we can still trace out the complete image in it entirety. Consciously or unconsciously, we recreate it from our own visual experience, filling in the gaps with new content. In this way, the image regains its plasticity and is mutated.
The exhibition Plastic Movie offers a pair of independent, yet interrelated works. Together they form a unit, yet each describes differing points of view on the subject by capturing and reconstituting the revealed image. Although the artist has outlined the image many times before, it is never quite complete, nor it is entirely absent. The exhibition offers no resolutions, only further question about the realm of images. The artist focuses on the presence of spatial objects, their tangibility and plasticity, or, in contrast their ungraspability and their ability to constantly slip out of complete representation. A motif present in both works is a twelve-sided Platonic solid known as a dodecahedron. In the gallery environment, this offers two possible modes of attention. One is to see a sculpture that continually rotates; the other is an ephemeral shape that one can detect in a recording of a performance that was created in the gallery space. In both cases, the defined paramaters are accentuated, which affects how the recording and presentation, and thus the newly manifested object, are observed in that particular time and place.
Tomáš Moravec (b. 1985 Prague) graduated in 2012 with a degree in fine art from the studio of Intermedia under Jiří Příhoda in Prague. His work can be described as “spatial situations”, most often consisting of objects, videos and installations. His projects with Matej Al Ali, Petr Dub and Roman Štětina take the form of various artistic collaborations or critical interventions in the public space. Moravec was a finalist for the Jindřich Calupecký Prize (2008), the Exit Prize (2009), and winner of the Václav Chad Prize (2015). Moravec did residencies in Budapest (2011), New York (2013) and Vienna (2013). He work has been presented in Czech and international contexts (Biennale Liége, BB15 Linz, Trafó Gallery Budapest, James and Audrey Foster Prize Boston). The artist lives and works in Prague.
