Evangelium postpravdy v Japonsku
Luděk Rathouský: The Gospel of Post-Truth
The term post-truth has become, according to the Oxfrod dicitonary, a key word of the year 2016, mainly due to sharpened political campaigns in USA and Great Britain. Objective facts are not important anymore; our opinion is developed on the background of shared contributions on social networks, and emotions play a crucial role here. Quoting Jiří Přibáň, a well-known sociologist, we are not searching for truth anymore, but only a confirmation of our prejudices.
Using „fake news“, false or distorted claims and rough or vulgar acting became a common tool for ruling the (political) world.
Reality, presented through the media and absorbed by an individual, has been an important issue for Luděk Rathouský since his early painting series (Massmedia, 2002, Production, 2005 etc.). Similarly to quick television news shots or info-entertainment windows on web platforms, he is depicting fragments of surrounding world. Using his social sensuality, he is commenting social situation, consumer culture, values crisis and their depletion; sometimes intuitively, not very particularly, often pragmatically rationally and sometimes only with a laconic commentary.
The Gospel of Post-Truth exhibition reflects Rathouský´s development in formal searching for new visuality: from the appropriation principle of gothic elements in painting (e.g. the series after the Master of Hohenfurt, Theodoric or masters from the Jagellonian era) to full independency of those elements in recent artwork. Fragments of gothic morphology serve as a source of expression. The artistic principle, abstracting reality into meaningful surfaces, apparent more or less, is not limited to open commentary of contemporary affairs, but irritate a sense for past feeling through contemporary means. We could say that film directors (e.g. Ingmar Bergman) are trying to make a historical movie in period „colorfulness“ – Rathouský is thus trying to express our reality with a colorfulness of gothic era. The messages inside his paintings are closed systems of truths (and post-truths), enciphered by the author into visual shortcuts. A wilful way to knowledge and desire for original depicition led him to original, peculiar expression, which, athough is highly actual, evokes old-times and something familiar. Seeming un-contemporary approach and certain unpossibility of placing his work into mainstream makes Rathouský a remarkable person on the art scene.
Luděk Rathouský (*1975) is also a member of the Czech art collective Rafani.
He is a leader of the painting studio at Brno Faculty of Fine Arts. As a co-founder of the Luxfer Gallery project, focused on decentralization of contemporary art area, he works as a curator as well.
Kateřina Štroblová
Výstava byla doprovozena přednáškou na Joetsu University of Education
The exhibition was co-organised by Galerie Luxfer.
