Jan Stolín | Aereas

Faculty of Arts and Architecture, Technical University of Liberec
Edition FUA TUL, Spaces Series
Koncept / Concept: Karel Srp, Jan Stolín
Úvodní text a rozhovor / Introduction and interview by: Karel Srp
Recenzenti / Editorial consultants: Tomáš Vlček, Daniel Hanzlík

Foto / Photo: Jaroslav Beneš, Jan Mahr, Martin Polák, Ondřej Polák, Petr Procházka, Vasil Stanko, Jan Stolín, Oskar Stolín, Studio Flusser, Tomáš Tesař
Grafický design / Graphic design: Radka Folprechtová, Jan Stolín, Barbora Solperová

Vydání první / First edition
Fakulta umění a architektury, Technická univerzita v Liberci, Studentská 1402/2, 461 17 Liberec 1, Česká republika
ISBN 978-80-7494-554-0

In 2017, Jan Stolín exhibited a unique work of art entitled An Object for JS which he described as “a coffin design for JS”. It was a white, smooth and diagonally subtly inclined shape reminiscent of minimalist reliefs of the 1960’s yet differing from them in one substantial aspect: on the coffin’s front side (where the head would be placed) was a blower dispersing every now and then artificial mist symbolising human breath. Stolín created a contemporary, animated tomb primarily intended for himself and only secondarily focused on viewers. His sarcastic object raises questions whose answers lead us back to the period of Stolín’s studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague where he was accepted shortly before 1989. He was admitted to the studio of Josef Malejovský, the major representative of social realism and a figuralist also known for his mid-1960’s geometrical reliefs. Stolín took the opposite direction, stimulated by the post-1989 changes that he witnessed as a student. He finished his studies under Professor Kurt Gebauer, graduating with—for that period—exceptionally radical, abstract works. At the turn of the 1980’s and 1990’s, Stolín focused on simple, compositionally intertwined works referring to architecture
towards which he had been gravitating more than towards figuration (in particular, towards its compositional patterns leading him to proportions that became his fundamental, long-lasting theme). His sculptures give an impression of existing as transpersonal forces without any connection to the human body, excluding it from their centre and reducing it to a fugacious, superfluous event. 
Everything beyond this universe finds itself on a changeable, elusive fringe outside any hidden order. The effect of Stolín’s Object for JS consisted in the contrast of a solid prism and a passing smoke and was enhanced in moments when that dematerialised substance had been rising from the inside. The artist’s object looked like a precise copy of a construction segment transposed into an exhibition hall; its appearance maximally corresponding to reality. This demonstrates the essential feature of Stolín’s approach: getting as consonant as possible with the surrounding environment while keeping a permanent connection to it without ever being opposed to it.

Stolín’s artistic stance had solidified already in the 1989–1992 period of his studies at the Arts Academy when he zeroed in on upright steles and laid slabs that almost merged into the ground. Both these attitudes resembled votive steles or tombs. They were distinguished by a calm meditative introspection and contemplative restriction constriction. An inner structure pervaded their solid geometrical shape. One of Stolín’s earliest objects consisted of regularly recurring sequences of laths supporting a thin board. His immediate inspiration came from a sectional view of a floor he randomly glimpsed. Stolín generalised the floor’s basic composition, transforming that generalisation into a unique work of art. It attested to the artist’s inclination toward depersonalised architectural segments and accessories representing largely overlooked auxiliary elements such as switchboards and air-conditioning units. The deliberate strain within such objects was ensured by utmost balancing between closeness and openness, by their mutually conditioning correlativity. The closer they were, the more vigorous was the need of their openness; the more explicitly the surrounding environment was growing through them and the more obviously they required a hermetic grip. Stolín’s work, developed during his studies, culminated at the Milevsko exhibition in 1993 and at the Pecka Gallery a year later. The artist reached the limits of shape development, using various materials (such as wood, glass and metal) and various techniques (compressing, separating, undulation and interruption). The regular rhythm of ribs was quietened by a surface merging into the surroundings while the circumferential walls delimited the void. Stolín’s objects were so much immersed in themselves that they thwarted any breakthrough of sensitivity (which they attenuated to a considerable extent). Nonetheless, they freed the action of deeper psychic layers related to anxiety which were provoked by the variable extent to which the existence of space was admitted. What was clearly brought to a head was the presence of the psychic aspect which seemed to have entered into the artist’s creation in a roundabout way, as if incognito and perhaps even against his will. After his plywood objects of the early 1990’s Stolín switched to pastels, focusing on reversible spaces and diversely shaped walls, all indicating his further direction. Their common theme was a diversely delimited, empty inner space. Getting in harmony with flat surfaces, which he had determinedly been approaching, provided Stolín with a crucial stimulus that he did not turn into practice until the late 1990’s. From a closed object he arrived at working with the exhibition venue as a whole, available to be treated at will. This shift in the artist’s approach was also encouraged by his clinging to various installation materials used to prepare exhibitions. He refused to introduce into the chosen venues anything that did not originally belong to it, anything that would have a contradictory effect. The highlight of Stolín’s 1998 exposition III/5, named after the identification numbers of a house situated on the Edvard Beneš Square in Liberec2, was an object that had already existed in that house before and sort of prefigured the event. It was nothing but a fibreboard relief which the artist noticed accidentally and which owed its simple geometrical shape and abstract look to its purpose: disguising an energy counter and wiring. Stolín created an imitation of this object for his exhibition held at the Galerie Die Aktualität des Schönen… (DADS), which is situated near the number III/5 house. The exhibit became the last tangible object that the artist realised, prefiguring the installation of three built-in artificial partitions bearing no artwork, contrary to what the visitors would have expected. The partitions turned into a living organism, into ‘sensitive fields’ both stimulating and dampening sensory experience. Some of them were interactive. Their effect resided in their raw, unfinished appearance as if the installation crew had just left them, and in the very partitioning of the room’s external section (where the viewers found themselves) and the remaining space beyond the wall whence came the sound and an air-conditioning duct. By moving along the viewer set those hidden properties in motion. The chinks between the partitions let in the light, the air flew in through their vents and occasionally one could hear a clear sound. Compared to Stolín’s older objects, the built-in partitions opened themselves to greater sensitivity while staying on the extreme threshold of possible artistic utterance. They became a place of both direct and mediated sensory experiences, inverting the role of the gallery: the elements that ought to be as inconspicuous as possible grew into the very theme of the artwork. Having made use of them, the artist withdrew into himself, utterly identifying himself with the performed installation. The elements found themselves inside him, representing his own body. Stolín weighed up to where he could unfold the visual, auditive or another sensory experience. The interactivity of the partition, responding to the viewer’s movements, was still intensely brought to a head in Indistinct Evidence (2000), erected in the House of Arts of České Budějovice (2000). The next step was achieved on the occasion of the finals of Jindřich Chalupecký’s Award at Prague’s Trade Faire Palace (2000), when Stolín freed that artificial partition from its bonds to the surrounding space, transforming it into an exhibit in the proper sense of the word, an exhibit out of context that could be walked around and looked at from both sides. Nothing was concealed, all was open. The front and the back, the reverse side and the face had counterbalanced themselves. 

In his subsequent installations Stolín employed aluminium extrusion profiles used to build plasterboard walls. The former ones served him an inspiration to realise dramatic intersections of the inner and the outer space—whether it was an interior (filled with disorderly piled props and struts highlighted with multiple colours evoking haphazardness), or whether it involved breaking through a window frame of the Regional Art Gallery Liberec (2013) into the exterior so as to provoke a semblance of excess pressure brought about by
a sudden explosion. The fluent oscillation of Stolín’s objects between interior and exterior allowed them to develop different degrees of interconnection. Still a more distinctive shift in Stolín’s approach was evident in his work 17 Gallery Lights (2001) shown at the Telecom Exposition Hall in Louny. For this occasion, the artist unscrewed from the ceiling a bar with several lamps, and laid them on the floor, pointing them at the perimeter walls. The room equipment thus served as a go-between providing a technical source for the dematerialised exhibits in the form of cast light. An element external to the installation served to transmit an internal message. As if the artist had stepped out of his body. The spotlights and reflectors embodied the hidden organs of his sensitivity.

Other buildings offered yet more complex and less accessible elements than those Stolín so far used in his installations. In the year 2000, he centred his attention on circular conducts of air-handling systems which, in Czechoslovakia, saw massive development during the 1990’s. Generally, hardly anyone would take notice of them unless he or she looked up—only then the ducts, the vents or the strange tin outfalls fixed on external walls or roofs made an appearance. Air-conditioning systems captivated the artist so much that he devoted an entire decade to them. They offered him the possibility of deepening his fundamental themes: the passage between the exterior and the interior and the element of air,
particularly the air flowing through the ducts. Stolín placed such air distributing objects on balconies and galleries of historical buildings, churches, palaces or cubist houses, or used them to enliven cloisters of monasteries transformed into art galleries. The way the artist embraced air-conditioning systems was concurrently reflected in his autonomous artworks as well as in public monuments he designed. The former category was represented by his air duct installation presented at the 2000 finals of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award held
at the Trade Fair Palace in Prague. Emanating from Stolín’s object, situated at an upper gallery, was a kind of elemental overpressure penetrating into the peristyle from an unlit empty room where few people dared to enter. Visitors were left with the impression that the object had been abandoned by air-conditioning servicemen and that general maintenance work must have been underway. Ripped out of their usual context, the air circulation technical facilities thus acquired almost a mysterious expression of something inappropriate
and disturbing. The category of Stolín’s public monuments from that period is represented by the Memorial for the Fighters and Victims of the Fight for the Freedom of the Country (2000). Dedicated to both forgotten and remembered heroes, it is situated in a vast green space of the Liberec city. It is conceived as a technicistic two-part structure whose wire-mesh walls are filled with aluminium ducts. When strolling between them, the viewer sets in motion ventilators and digital panels. If the shiny silver duct exposed at the Prague
Trade Fair Palace gave the impression of an alien object, the Liberec memorial was an allusion to an unconcealed engine (covered with no opaque cover). Stolín considers that his technicistic artworks intended for expositions and public monuments permeate one another: “The Liberec memorial followed up on my exhibition at the House of Art in České Budějovice, where a few ventilators and fluorescent lamps were hidden behind a partition. They did not come to the visitor’s attention until he or she approached that partition.
In the memorial, by contrast, I bared the hidden ‘engine room.’ One could see the sources of sound and light as well as the digital text bars. In the subsequent installation I wilfully disclosed those sources. For that reason, the memorial project—however different from the rest—had its importance. Well integrated into a city park (which itself we perceived as a monument), the memorial comes alive only with visitors. It is deliberately located beyond the axis of the park and the nearby streets. The passageway through the park is oriented
to a distant horizon in the one direction, and to a built-up area in the other. The monument together with the park form a kind of landscape offering an interactive site to commemorate past events.” Because of uniqueness, the monument has become a forceful place, which at that time had no equivalent in Czechia. The engine, surrounded by green vegetation, expressed a desire for freedom; the flowing air acquired an existential dimension, which had to do with the human body and the overcoming of anxiety.

The air-conditioning duct endowed Stolín’s work with a distinct content focus whose expression required no allegory. The supple visceral aspect of the flexible duct, reminding of the body’s internal organs, made visible what normally remained concealed. Along with biomorphy Stolín began to develop the duct’s architectural character. In the exhibition Model Fictions (2001), held at the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague, a duct came out of a stairhead niche and continued up to the middle of the glass-fronted room. Thus, it caught the attention of pedestrians walking down the Národní Třída boulevard, amazing them by its totally unexpected originality. The deepening of his metonymic approach accentuating
factuality became yet more apparent in his bulky installations created within the Aeronále project (2008) for the Prague airport. The monumentality of the artefact was in perfect harmony with the site: what ought to remain concealed was not only disclosed but also mistook (confusion and mistaking thus became one of the characteristic features of the installations). The random visitor took the duct for an integral part of the airport interior.

Stolín’s long-standing interest in air motion led him to use fans and ventilators to bring sound and motion into his installations. His work 5.2 m/s (2001), presented at Galerie Pecka in Prague, combined the sound of fans (recorded by microphones in front of them) with a projection of a replayed recording of small paper plates being flown away from the shot and stacked up again. The artist interconnected the object and a pre-recorded action so that they supported and complemented one another. He thematised a seemingly insignificant
and repetitive activity, pointing out its transience and futility, the fissured dwelling in a present without past or future, seemingly filled with nothingness. He created installations in which the air was represented either by means of ducts (representing the inner motion of the air), or by means of ventilators (setting in motion the ambient air). The two of them expressed ephemerality, irreversible fading away and disappearing.

The inner overpressure, retained within the objects from Stolín’s final years of studies, had spread into multiple forms combined in each single work. The combination of recorded sound with screened images, often complemented with other elements, resulted in an ever-expanding field of meaning. Curtains were the new means of expression that the artist employed to partition space and make the images screened on them blurred and fuzzy. Most of the abstract images consisted of incessantly moving horizontal or vertical stripes
of different width and colour. The curtain could also refer to an enigma evoking the presence of something unknown. This type of work might be related to Stolín’s criticism of the axis system reflecting the mindset against which he would define himself in his installation XYZ (2004), exposed in České Budějovice. It involved screening the aimlessly moving horizontal stripes which flooded the viewer’s visual field while themselves reaching the very threshold of irrationality.

Stolín confronted the bearers of ‘zero information’ (restricted to a sensation veiling the sight and going beyond it) with a totally opposite information that can be observed in extreme forms of human, that is physical, presence in pornographic movies. This genre has been appearing in his installations since 2003. The relation between Stolín’s abstract stripes and diverse types of human body performances could hardly be more unique. Attracted by the interconnection of contradictory, polarising situations, the artist worked with contrasting degrees of sensory experience involving reversed levels of communicated message (one is computer generated whereas the other concerns carnality, at times accelerated up to the limit of transparency). In Parallel Screening (2004, House of Arts, Opava), the two opposites are separated by a white curtain diagonally dividing the room, whose corners are fitted with a TV screen (showing a pornographic movie) and ventilators (whose sound is recorded by a microphone). The air flow set the curtain in motion, making it uncomfortable for the viewer to follow the screened images. Pornographic sequences were at the heart of Stolín’s later work entitled 60–120 Frames Per Second (2007, Galerie 99, Brno). In this  installation, all the screens were framed in red, green or purple backgrounds, which reflected themselves on the floor of the dusky room. A succession of repetitive bodily movements
within such monochromatic frameworks was constantly creating an image in another image (a paradoxical relation of the carnal conjunction of two visual perceptions), provoking tensions that crossed each other in the viewer’s mind.

Intertwining in Stolín’s installations are various levels of mental experience. Sometimes, the viewer’s participation is required; at other times it is dispensable. In Peephole (2015, DADS, Liberec), three screens, hung in a row, turned into a half public, half private peep show. Erotic motives were scrolling in circular fields on the screens. In A Projection for the Ferret (2015, The North Bohemian Museum, Liberec), on the contrary, the viewer stayed outside of the artwork: “In Peephole I used a short sequence from several pornographic videos. It was a kind of ready-made. The accelerated image gave an impression of mechanically rhythmised picture whose original purpose completely disappeared.” The short glimpses of the videos impressed themselves into the unconscious from which they could be released at any time. The inverse pole of this approach was embodied in a motionless ferret, closely watching a movie recording. The animal was temporarily extracted from its destiny of a stuffed exponent in a natural history museum. In both the aforementioned
installations, Stolín brought the issue of sensuality as far as possible: his peep show ceased to excite, while the tensions in the ferret’s face were provoked by a marginal film. Insignificance became central to his interest, as we could already see in 5.2 m/s. It also inspired the artist’s introductory object at the III/5 exposition. For the exhibition The Soul’s Interiors (2017), in which a selection of artists were asked to pick up the threads of the previously restored interiors from Adolf Loos in Pilsen, Stolín used three elements to assemble his installation: a polystyrene partition, a curtain and an erotic photograph. All of them were quite distant to those that Loos had employed. Stolín even spoke of some irony implied by his technique: “The partition, composed of insulation polystyrene boards, was installed at the Pilsen exhibition hall Masné krámy, which belongs to the West Bohemian Gallery.    As insulation polystyrene is available in different colours, it went well together with the colourful interiors from Adolf Loos. There was a bit of criticism or irony regarding of the way in which Loos’s interiors in Pilsen had been renovated. The restoration was well done but the result has rather a hollow effect. That is why I placed an erotic or, rather, a pornographic photo behind the layer of polystyrene. Even though the depicted scene makes a pretence of eroticism, we have a feeling of intimacy and excitement. The original interiors, when
still inhabited, must have aroused the same feeling. Today, they are reminiscent of the somewhat cold rooms of a museum.” Thus, the installation articulated one of the traits of Stolín’s reflection residing in the creation of opposites to given facts—a turnover that brings to the surface contradictory meanings.

Jan Stolín’s basic theme—the combination of projection and air handling equipment—found expression at two distinct levels. The notional ‘zero’ image, whose transformations depended on sound recording, was shown on a screen or projected directly on a gallery wall. Simultaneously, by mediation of the ‘zero’ image, air was being brought from ventilators (either built into white cuboids, or exposed as objects apart) or from individually standing fans. Their sound, recorded by microphones, had an impact on the monochromatic
blue colour. The artist found two ways to express his archetypal experience, resulting from unconscious conflicts: in Diptych (2016) and in two subsequent installations (2016, Galerie NOD, Prague; 2016, Art Space NOV, Pardubice). “The changes of the blue surface were operated by a computer programme. The recorded sound of the ventilators made it possible for the blue surface to interactively turn into a red one.” In both the cases, Stolín narrowed down his artistic expression into the absolutely indispensable perceptible form, dematerialising it as much as possible, ridding it of its invariability and permanence. Doing so he was able to approach the margins of sensory experience, or the inaccessible sign references turned in on themselves.

One of Stolín’s exhibitions held during his academy years (in 1990) included a simple structure resembling a house with a sloped roof. We can find the bottom view of same house depicted in one of the artist’s pastels. The structure clearly spoke of Stolín’s attachment to architecture. Lacking both doors and windows, it was comprised of neat, empty surfaces. What was crucial here was the structure’s closed shape. Many years later, a similar structure would be penetrated by artificial mist, bringing up the question of soul and its presence. This issue found particular expression during a one-day performative installation organised within the project Turn on a Light for Pešánek (2019) at the Central Bohemian Gallery in Kutná Hora. Coming out of one of the windows of the former Jesuit dormitory was artificial fog illuminated by lights. In a few minutes the fog dispersed and melted into passing thunderstorm clouds whose flashes of lightning accompanied the scene.

Karel Srp

(The quotations by Jan Stolín were borrowed from the emails
exchanged with the author of the above text throughout
the year 2020.)