Martin Herold

Sine sole sileo (Néphéli Barbas, 2022)

« Modé né ci handan té mess méticheAstanéké dé mévéche / Ceci est la maison du grand homme Astané que tu as vu. »

Sine sole sileo – without the sun I am silent, is an inscription that can be commonly found on sundials since Roman times. It is, in the manner of the work of the two artists, an allegory that is infinitely declinable, like the shadow of the style on the dial. The course of the sun, the shadow cast by the style, makes the dial speak. Like the dance of the sun, the dance of the receiver, who in a perplexed wavering tries to decipher the message, is part of the mechanism of the anamorphosis, in a kind of conversation. Several themes intersect, dear to the artists: the relationship between language and architecture, intimate space and infinite space.

Architecture, like art, is a conversation through time – the facades speak, alternating signs like a sentence of words. Marie Raffn gives a voice to the flagpole, an object that is mostly unused and silent these days, but makes it borrow the prism of the baroque. A double echo, a double mirage, that of the undulation of the fabric on the mineral façade, that of these forms which say what the building wanted to keep silent. Signs/words from the Martian language of Hélène Smith, “muse of automatic writing”, are mixed in. In the same way that the features of the building have been deformed by a baroque prism, we see in this Martian language a deformation, a transfer of French: the phonology, the lexical division, the grammar and the syntax are the same as those of French. Marie Raffn operates through a multiple allegorical strategy, mixing her own message, with its baroque and organic vitality, made up of shortenings and dilations, with the symbols engraved on the Voyager Golden Record, embarked on the two Voyager space probes, launched in 1977. Two messages are intertwined – the almost supernatural message of the inexplicably animated facade, and the carefully considered message of the symbols engraved on the cover of the record, which was transformed into an archaeological artefact as soon as it was launched at its unstoppable speed. Perhaps the designers of this disc already had in mind the memories of their walks through the archaeological museum. Which brings us to another maxim that can be found on sundials: The immobile disperses and the moving endures.

The ways in which the two artists use anamorphosis as an allegory differ. Martin Herold welcomes the visitor in a frontal manner, seeming to want to keep him at a necessary distance, like these trompe-l’oeil perspectives that dissolve when they meet the visitor’s body. Even as he seeks to escape from a linear and measurable representation of time, more than ruins, the artist produces relics. Martin Herold once again substitutes location for extent, for the idea of infinitely open space constituted by Galileo. With the reproduction of this rood screen, Martin Herold rehabilitates the idea of the sacred place, which was dissolved with the discovery that the earth revolves around the sun, and thus petrifies these objects. Unlike Marie Raffn, who draws infinite lines from an intimate space, Martin Herold brings the infinite back into an object that can be apprehended in a global way, that offers itself to the viewer in an extremely satisfying way, as a kind of utopia, that of the conquest of space, brought back into a real place, into a setting, and even more so, into an object. Martin Herold centralises, Marie Raffn wanders, undulates.

Marie Raffn and Martin Herold demonstrate the anachronistic nature of art and its capacity to complexify time. Martin Herold’s Limoges rood screen is itself a time-bending object, holding in suspense incompatible models: half Italian Renaissance (mythically inspired, representing the twelve labours of Hercules), half flamboyant Gothic, it also has details whose distorted perspective is so strange that it seems to have been created only in our own time by an artificial intelligence. Both artists highlight the capacity of art to seek both a past and a future, to communicate through time by fabricating memory. In The Story of Your Life, a short science fiction novel written by Ted Chang, heptapods come to Earth to make contact with the human species. The linguist recruited to communicate with them understands that the heptapods’ writing system comes from the way they perceive time, simultaneously, which abolishes the idea of free will. The two artists thus seek to move away from a linear vision of time to approach it in an infinitely positive way, as infinite echoes of the past or the future.

If Marie Raffn and Martin Herold play with the idea of anamorphosis, the question remains of where to stand. Perhaps there is a certain type of anamorphosis that does not require the viewer to observe a specific position, but rather invites the viewer to find the imaginary point of view where two distinct artistic positions coincide in a coherent whole. Marie Raffn and Martin Herold draw lines between intimacy and infinity, like bottles in the interstellar sea.

_{Zelené jiskry (Petr Vaňous, 2022)}

In the SIX WINDOWS project, Martin Herold concentrates on the iconography of the window, including its iconic connotations. The window has been thematized as a multivalent narrative, whose interpretation can range from the description of the original to the meta-interpretation (as the window to the world). For the author, “the effort to create some imaginative space” is absolutely essential. The window is depicted as a frame for things that can be seen, where one can look in both directions – out of but also inside the imaginary interior. The inside and outside polarity are already a well-established conventions of perception that Herold keeps updating in terms of the immediate present time. He collects window themes in his immediate neighbourhood and works with specific, not with second-hand materials (models).

The window itself is a “construct of vision”; with a symmetrical composition, disturbed by accidentality of situations (e.g. a moving shadow) in the picture. In front of the window opening are placed lattices or roller blinds, which obtain a symbolic significance. The author talks about an “emotional filter”. Slight dimensional differences lead to an examination of the canonical representation. Everything essential here takes place in the insignificant and in the particular. Martin Herold tests our attention; he points to the moment of a concentrated look that has an important feature – it is capable of differentiation. In this context, he opposes the unification of standardization of digital tools and the mechanical stylization of the subject matter. Herold emancipates human view in connection with the nature of human perception, which is much more varied than we would expect.

Šest oken (Petr Vaňous, 2018)

V projektu ŠEST OKEN se Martin Herold koncentruje na ikonografii okna, včetně jeho ikonologických konotací. Okno je tu tematizováno jako víceznačný narativ, jehož interpretace může sahat od popisu viděného (předlohy) až k meta-výkladům (viz okno do světa). Pro autora je podstatná „snaha po vytvoření jakéhosi imaginativního prostoru“. Okno funguje jako rám pro to, co lze vidět, přičemž pohled je veden oběma směry, ven z- i dovnitř pomyslného interiéru. Právě polarita uvnitř a vně je již určitou ustálenou percepční konvencí, kterou Herold podrobuje aktualizaci z hlediska bezprostřední současnosti. Motivy oken sbírá ve svém blízkém okolí. Pracuje tak s konkrétním, nikoliv přejatým věcným materiálem (předlohy).

Okno samo je „konstrukt vidění“. Má zpravidla symetrickou kompozici, porušenou v obraze náhodnostmi situace (např. vržený stín). Před okenním otvorem jsou umístěny mříže nebo rolety, které získávají symbolický význam. Autor hovoří o„emocionálním filtru“. Nepatrné tvarové odlišnosti vedou k ohledávání zobrazovacího kánonu. Vše podstatné se tu odehrává v nepatrnostech a v detailu. Martin Herold bystří naši pozornost. Poukazuje na moment koncentrovaného pohledu, který má důležitou vlastnost: je schopen rozlišení. V této souvislosti jde proti sjednocovacím typizacím digitálních nástrojů a proti mechanické stylizaci věcných předloh. Herold emancipuje lidský pohled ve vazbě na přirozenost lidského vnímání, které je mnohem pestřejší, nežli bychom předpokládali.

Diploma (Silke Otto-Knapp, 2014 )

In early nineteenth-century France, landscape painting was narrowly circumscribed by an aesthetic code upheld by the conservative French Academy. Painters and sculptors were rigorously trained in the Neoclassical tradition to emulate artists of the Renaissance and classical antiquity. In the hierarchy of historical subjects recognized by the Academy, pure landscape painting was not a privilege. At best, artists could hope to paint an idealized nature inspired by ancient poetry. The grand classicizing subjects of the seventeenth-century painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain presented other acceptable models. Camille Corot, perhaps the most influential of all French landscape painters of the nineteenth century, never settled in Fontainebleau with the other painters of the Barbizon school, although its rocky outcroppings and majestic trees informed some of his prized early paintings. Fontainebleau: Oak Trees at Bas-Bréau is one of the most vigorous and precise. Its sharply focused topography stands in contrast to his much later paintings, Ville-d’Avray for example, in which nature dissolves in a silvery mist of tonal lyricism. Corot always returned to the studio to process his visual experience and never admitted conflict in reconciling academic values with the newfound freedom afforded by direct observation.

It might be strange to evoke the 19th century Barbizon school of landscape painting and the work of Camille Corot in relationship to Martin Herold’s new group of paintings for his diploma exhibition at the Prague Academy of Fine Art in June 2014 but I think that his interest in painting landscapes and still lifes could be described as a subtle subversion or re-investigation of an academic painting tradition in the context of contemporary art production. His new group of paintings test the ‘freedom afforded by direct observation’ – or better: the physical presence of an object – against academic traditions within a conceptual framework.

For his exhibition he combines three large scale interior still life paintings of houseplants in a centralized composition with three landscapes that work with a composition of a clearing in a forest – a meadow, leafy trees that grow denser into the background and sky. The final painting in the series is a small canvas depicting a red light bulb emanating an artificial glow into an interior space. The small painting provides a key to the decisions made in the six large canvases. The chosen motif (landscape or still life) undergoes a series of transformations such a shift in the direction and tone of the light, the source of the light, the light at different times of the day as well as shifts from full colour into grey-scale or a specific tone. This play of variation and transformation points both to the physical presence of the observed object or landscape and the material experimentation of the painting process. The paintings appear as experiments testing the possibilities and limitations of the pictorial space against notions of genre and tradition. Martin Herold’s new paintings are an investigation into the processes and conditions of painting and the resulting formal and conceptual problems. In other words they set up a conceptual framework for the viewer to encounter these skilled and experimental paintings and transform traditional genres into a complex visual experience.

Silke Otto-Knapp
Associate Professor Painting and Drawing UCLA School of Art and Architecture
Los Angeles

Diplomová práce (Silke Otto-Knapp, 2014 )

Ve Francii počátku 19.století byla krajinomalba úzce vymezena estetickými zásadami prosazovanými konzervativní francouzskou Akademií. Malíři a sochaři byli důsledně školeni v duchu neoklasicistní tradice za účelem napodobení renesančních a klasických starověkých mistrů. V hierarchii historických témat uznávaných Akademií nestála čistá krajinomalba v popředí. V nejlepším případě mohli umělci doufat v malbu idealizované přírody inspirované antickou poezií. Velkolepé klasicizující náměty malířů 17.století Nicolase Poussina a Claude Lorraina představovaly další akceptovatelné modely tvorby. Camille Corot, snad nejvlivnější ze všech francouzských krajinářů 19.století, se nikdy neusadil ve Fontainebleau s dalšími umělci barbizonské školy, ačkoliv tamní skalní výběžky a majestátní stromy prostupovaly některé z jeho ceněných raných maleb. Obraz Fontaineblau: Duby v Bas-Bréau je jedním z těch nejdynamičtějších a nejpreciznějších. Jeho důraz na ostře zachycenou topografii stojí v kontrastu s jeho pozdějšími obrazy, jako například Ville-d’Avray, ve kterém přířoda splývá ve stříbřité mlze tonální lyričnosti. Corot se vždy vracel do ateliéru, kde zpracovával svůj vizuální zážitek a nikdy si nepřipouštěl rozpor v kombinování akademických hodnot s nově nabitou svobodou bezprostředního pozorování.

Může se zdát poněkud zvláštní připomínat barbizonskou školu krajinomalby 19.století a tvorbu Camilla Corota v souvislosti s novým cyklem obrazů Martina Herolda pro jeho diplomní výstavu na pražské Akademii v červnu 2014. Myslím ale, že jeho zájem o krajinomalbu a zátiší lze označit jako jemnou subverzi nebo znovu-ohledání tradice akademické malby v kontextu současné umělecké produkce. Jeho nová série obrazů testuje ‘svobodu umožněnou bezprostředním pozorováním’, nebo lépe: fyzickou přítomnost objektu, proti konceptuálnímu rámci akademické tradice.

Ve výstavní instalaci zvolil kombinaci tří centrálně umístěných velkoformátových zátiší pokojových rostin v interiéru a tří krajin, které pracují s kompozicí lesní mýtiny- louky, listnatých stromů, které houstnou směrem k pozadí a k nebi. Posledním obrazem série je malé plátno zobrazující červenou žárovku, která ozařuje interiér umělým světlem.  Tento malý obraz poskytuje klíč k rozhodnutí učiněných v šesti velkých plátnech.  Zvolený motiv (krajina nebo zátiší) podstupuje sérii proměn v závislosti na změnách směru a tónu světla, na posunech světelného zdroje, světla různých denních dob, nebo na přechodech od plné barevné škály k odstínům šedi či určitého tónu. Tato hra variací a proměn poukazuje jak na fyzickou přítomnost pozorovaného objektu či krajiny, tak na experimentování s materiálním procesem malby. Obrazy se zdají být experimenty testující možnosti a omezení obrazového prostoru vůči pojmům žánr a tradice.  Nové obrazy Martina Herolda jsou zkoumáním postupů a podmínek malby, a z něj vyplávajících formálních a konceptuálních otázek. Jinak řečeno, vytváří divákovi konceptuální rámec pro setkání  s těmito zvládnutými a experimentálními obrazy a přetvářejí tradiční žánry v komplexní vizuální prožitek.

Doc. Silke Otto Knapp
Malba a Kresba, UCLA School of Art and Architecture
Los Angeles