Landscape 2017

25. 01. 2017 - 03. 03. 2017

Gallery: New Gallery
Town: Prague
Country: Czech republic

LANDSCAPE 2017.
Heralds.

What is happening?
Is anything happening?

My dear Prince, here we are resting peacefully in your palace yet there is something going on outside, I can feel it, the rustling wind of unrest, it does not appreciate love and peace, it longs for blood, it feeds on the emotions of fear and suffering, dear Prince, here we are, lying, talking, and the Shadow is on its way.

We won’t escape from this Shadow of Shadows, we’ll have to live though it, today everything is so fast paced, dear Prince, yes, yes, I know, dear Sheherazade, it is so, it is fate, everyone has a fate, individuals and whole species, tribes, nations, countries, superstates and substates, the whole World, my dear Sheherazade, they have their predetermined time, place and vibration frequencies. Every object, every being, all matter has been created on the principle of opposites, it has its own frequency of vibrating, warm cold, light dark, evil good and so on, and all of this, my dear Shehe, is Mr Skullcap’s dream that he is dreaming about us and Mrs Carp is dreaming about Mr Skullcap, and who is dreaming about Mrs Carp?, unbelievable.

The one to create everything must have been the Creator, nothing remains but to go down on our knees, we are ghosts, dear Prince, nothing but ghosts, often walking, I know dear Shehe, I know, I am one, dear Prince, have you sent the heralds, where did they go and what message did they bear?, that’s a good question dear Sheh, the word herald refers to one who does an errand, bears a  message – to deliver information, sometimes the bearer is a jackass, more often than not, from one castle to another bearing a message from one king to another, information can take on various forms, they bring different emotions, there can be both: a good messenger and a bad message.

A beheaded herald is a sad thing, and there have been quite a few, the most significant of the executed heralds has been shown naked and tortured to death in an infinite number of mutations from artistic ones to Turkish ones all over the world for two millennia, he is meant to be the herald of peace, love, truth and a way of life, yet in the name of faith in Him the worst genocides ever have been committed  in Europe, the Americas, Australia and even in Asia, God’s heralds are known, everyone knows, dear Shehe, what God looks like as well as His heralds, the one with a white beard, that’s clear, angels are naked or they have white robes, fair hair, pink cheeks, they often have a willy and often they don’t, the dearest son and God’s herald, the bearer of light has horns and stinks of death, his message is war and hell

Let’s return to our heralds, though, my dearest, I have sent a regiment of riders in all directions bearing a message of peace, quiet, joy and love, they are carrying the shem of love in their hands and their message precedes them and immediately grips all hearts which immediately command the brains and suddenly there is peace and quiet, that is my goal, beautiful Sheherazade, it might be too late, we might have overslept a little, yet I’m hoping quietly, I fear, my wise Sheh, I fear, the Shadow is coming, everyone can feel that, I just wish we had overslept only so that people can still stop that Shadow.

Calm down, my dear Prince, we are sleeping, we are just the dream of Mr Skullcap and it is up to him when he wakes up and up to you too, my darlings.
Everybody can wake up.
Everybody can look at paintings and see what they are made of, what colours they have, see their composition. “Pisat” in Russian means to paint, painting in Czech - “malířství” - is derived from the word “malý”, little, to do something little or to do little, even that is quite accurate, in German a painter is one who creates something artificial and in English painting is about pain.

Every painting is a message, a story, an information knot, legible without words and behind words, art lovers can read it easily and over time even the others. All visual art consists of codes that people understand even when millennia have passed. The Antique knowledge of perspective boomed in painting six hundred years ago. The ability to create, to see and perceive the illusory space of the Renaissance painters had literally broadened the consciousness of people, perspective is clearly what sent the wheel of science rolling and is behind today’s unbelievable scientific progress, the use of machines is phenomenal.

The creation of rtificial intelligence able to learn and react independently is just one of the forms the Shadow takes on, dear Prince, it stinks just like all the other forms, you can learn about the exponential development of artificial intelligence and its use on the machine which has enabled its origin and which I am using to write these words.

The scientists’ dream has come true; we are really close, both in the study of matter and non-matter and what both really are. The Shadow and its servants are laughing their heads off, they support and serve each other in every possible way, they are heralds sent by darkness, their purpose is to establish the dominion of darkness, they have no mercy, they are not aware of what they do and many do so in good faith.
Paintings, dear Prince, strive to compose shapes into a whole, to create a harmonious composition in the painting expressing a whole complex of things, the artists’ knowledge and specific personal aesthetics in sign codes, they are created through the soul and reason, and behind words they are passed onto the onlooker, dear Prince, painting canvases is a strange job, there is something extra in the world hanging on the wall that can please both the eye and the spirit.

The subconscious reads the information in paintings and symbols at lighting speed and that’s why we may like or dislike something so quickly. Paintings are visions, paused visions. Imagine, for instance, that you could pause your dream or the flowing vision of a state of expanded consciousness, that’s impossible, yet paintings can do that.

And so the heralds are before you and you can contact them, take a look, lead a dialogue, subconsciously read and consciously start waking up, my message is the same as the prince’s and I also fear that it is too late. I know about my fear and about the Shadow, it would be a miracle if there was a twist for the better, but it can happen and that is my message too.

The message of peace is information that spreads incessantly once released. We have to spread it in all possible ways, the heralds must be varied, they have to use all possible means for spreading the information in all directions, upwards and downwards, to heaven and hell, it has to permeate everything.

Everything takes place in a landscape; life originated on land and only because of it persisted. Many of life’s outgrowths are unbelievably viable and their number keeps growing. In one case, not only the number of individuals increases, but also their knowledge of the laws that enable the creation of an animated landscape, land is alive even if most life has vanished from it.

Stones and rocks have also been created and have their beginning, middle and end, they are alive, they have their own vibration, energy and they glow, therefore Earth is a living being and behaves as such, it has its rhythms and frequencies, its water arteries, its red-hot lakes and rivers of magma, its exhausts and its suctions, its surface is beauty in itself and in addition to the countryside there is the atmosphere surrounding it that we can see as the blue sky and we can breathe it and thanks to it everything that breathes air can live.
Just like in a landscape painting, everything else is composed of the tiniest particles of light, any matter can glow: it is light in its essence, pure nothingness with a particle here and there.

The beauty of the landscape is amazing, I always get emotional on my way home, I recognize the rhythm and the character of the Ostrava landscape immediately right on the borders of Haná, it is signalized by the first large clusters of mistletoe on tall alder and poplar trees as it starts getting hilly behind Přerov.

Whenever I return - and I prefer to do so in the old-school way by train - to the shapes of matter in the place of my birth, the countryside of my childhood, which irrevocably inscribes itself into our personality, I get goose bumps and sometimes tears in my eyes, every journey home is the way to one’s roots and death.

Our ancestors have sent us to live in a landscape, we are their heralds and at the same time, surprisingly, we bear them, their genes, skills, everything that is inscribed in the structure of living matter, that is, the DNA, and by its means it is spread throughout millennia.
It is possible that we only know one landscape, the landscape of our native region, the landscape of childhood, but who knows all the places where we were born in our previous lives, if they exist, or through genetic memory of our ancestors who often lived on various continents. Travellers say that the landscape in Africa is incredibly beautiful and that it feels very familiar, all indications are that the human race originated right there, in south-east Africa.

There is no doubt about genetic and cell memory, the landscape of the Earth is our landscape, people’s landscape.
Respect and emotion conveyed in its magnificence, its “beauty”, can be experienced anywhere on Earth and we also like to look at landscape paintings from different eras, different painters and different regions. I have always been fascinated by the Dutch masters’ landscapes, not because of their artistic quality but just for the shapes of the cultural landscape, architecture, people and animals in the landscapes of their time and so of the Russian, American, English and any other master painters who dedicated and have dedicated themselves to capturing the landscape and were and are inspired by its shapes in composing their artwork in a sometimes more and sometimes less “realistic”, sometimes “non-realistic” and even surrealistic  or nota bene and Oh Lord! “abstract” manner and yet we feel and see such paintings as landscapes.
Everything we see is an image of the seen created through our consciousness, eye physiology and the processing of the chemical and electric signals as they are sent to the reception centres in the brain and subsequently brought to attention and evaluated by whom? and what?, let’s call it the observer, consciousness, the soul.

Every painting is a landscape. A landscape of spots, lines and colourful planes, the subconscious reads the codes in these and subsequently enables the consciousness to react - not only to the artistic quality, beauty or non-beauty, message or revelation. For instance, the beauty of the sludge ponds and slag heaps of Ostrava is interpreted by the subconscious just as quickly as the cultural and artistic codes in paintings, consciousness enables their perception and reflexion.

Paintings are the heralds or messengers of the state of consciousness of their authors as well as the “condition” of the depicted subjects. Landscape paintings, that is, from a certain point of view all paintings, are heralds conveying a message about the state of our awareness of the landscape, of our perception of the seen and unseen, the ability to capture the landscape through painting, photography, sculpture and eventually other art forms, perhaps even music or dance.

So there are thousands and thousands of figurations of symbols and laws making the landscape possible, laws that might have been created by living beings with the human skill of depicting in colour, as in the case of our Landscape 2017 exhibition, mainly on canvases and for us, viewers, to look at them and be able to read them, enjoy a good read and get all emotional, examine with pleasure or turn away in disgust, all that is a part of the game with painters, gallerists, viewers, investors and many other professions taking part in making art.
The one to create the laws that created the landscape must have been the Creator.

I wish people would like our message, enjoy the quiet focus, relax in the joyful rapture of the individual canvases’ atmosphere, had fun at the opening night and enjoyed being together. Such a broad-based collective exhibition has a charm of its own and will show how almost forty artists of most generations, from well established artists to students, see and capture the landscape in paint.
Our message is clear – peace. 

 

Martin Mainer