Jan Lesák

Jan Lesák is a photographer who is constantly interrogating and transcending the possibilities of the photographic medium and its presentation. He graduated from the Faculty of Arts and Design in Ústí nad Labem with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the Pavel Baňka photography studio, and a doctorate in visual communication supervised by Zdena Kolečková. He is most interested in post-production, often responding to existing objects or products that are part of our cultural history in a broad sense, and reflecting upon their potentially new combinations and contexts.

Lesák made a name for himself with his art school leaving project Případ pro začátečníka / Case for a Beginner, which was exhibited at the Fotograf Gallery (2011). This was a record of a long-term process, the essence of which was the transformation of a film component into an object. Lesák exhibited a photograph of a block of A4 paper, on which he typed all of the spoken words from the film by Pavel Juráček Případ pro začínajícího kata / Case for a Rookie Hangman. In other photos Lesák allowed the viewer to look into the block and into other lines from the film. A diagram on the wall then showed the depth of the copy and the effect of the texts. Lesák transformed the film into an object and the object into photography, and thus preserved and gave us a sense of a storyline in which everything happens all at once within a single time frame. This post-conceptual approach to work and an interest in appropriation went on to become a fundamental theme in Lesák’s works.

While on a residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York (2013), he decided to investigate a work by Jan Dibbets from the 1960s entitled Perspective Correction. Conceptual art was still in its infancy in the USA and this work, based on the discovery of the relationship between photographic record and reality, in which the photograph becomes an illusion, was of huge significance in the development of conceptual photography. Lesák realised that, as part of his residency, he had been allocated a very similar studio to that used by Dibbets, and took it upon himself to “repeat” the work in almost the identical space. His site-specific installation INSIDE is in fact a duplication or multiplication of the content of Dibbet’s work. The conceptual discovery of the possibilities and relationships between reality and illusion was brought into the 21st century, from photography it enters space, and thus reveals to the viewer the essence of the photographic illusion: the correction of perspective.

In the same year Lesák attempted another site-specific project at the Galerie Altán Klamovka entitled between on the portrayal of the antithesis between historicism and modernism. In the romantic, historical environment of Altán he covered the domed roof with a black board, onto which he shone the circle of the diameter of the roof using a floodlight. The result was that the radical geometric message of modernism shone from the doors of Altán out into the park.

Lesák undertook another site-specific installation entitled Touching the Art (the Fragile and Forgotten) while on a residency at art quarter budapest (aqb). The curators requested that the final exhibition consist of a reflection upon Budapest and its links with the artist’s homeland. Lesák discovered in the archive of the Artpool Art Research Center, which charts art from the 1960s onwards, a folder marked Valoch CZ. Valoch’s correspondence with the archive dating back to the 1960s and 70s was full of delicate drawings, collages, visual and conceptual poetry and texts. Lesák took photographs of the file and exhibited them.

Appropriation for Lesák represents the possibility of redefining the issues of the present, an archaeology of historical facts as grasped within a contemporary context. History is shifted in time and space. As we look at this history, it becomes both a memory and a new discovery, a reconstruction. Above all it speaks of the system of values of our present world.

Lesák continued in a similarly minimalist spirit in the project Peripheral Vision (2016), in which he focused on working with the medium and its materiality. A traditional black-and-white photo, which in this case is only a black monochrome surface, creates an image, almost a reflection, on the surface of glossy photo-paper. The photographs have radically changed proportions and create compact compositions inspired by the principle of geometric abstraction, the size of which is based on the width of the roll of photo-paper.

In Running in Haze, which was first exhibited in 2016 at the House of the Lords of Kunštát in Brno, Lesák works with his concept of photography as object and its transformation into black, grey and white glossy surfaces, into a gradient that he deems an element of contemporary visual culture. The architecture of the exhibition consists of a modular system from the Swedish brand FOGA, which is used in the advertising industry and lends itself to being used in a multiplicity of ways. The title Running in Haze is taken from a Lust For Youth music video.

One might argue that in these recent projects Lesák has begun a new stage in his career. On the other hand he works with photography in the same way he used to work with film or archive. The real change is that he now deprives the viewer of any orientation within their memories and experiences and leads them to an as yet completely unknown understanding of things and contexts that is only in the process of being formed.

INNER IMAGE Appearing /Disappearing Images, ISBN 978-80-7464-964-6, Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok, Poland A TIME FOR DREAMS, Peripheral Vision, ISBN 978-5-94620-093-6, National Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, 2014, RU FILM. Directed by Artists 2, Nitra Gallery, ISBN 978-80-857 46-62-4, 2013, Nitra, SK Začarovaný kruh / Magic Circle, exhibition catalog, Případ pro začátečníka / The Case for a Rookie, 978-80-7414-380-9, Prague, 2011, CZ Making Worlds, exhibition catalogue, Reproduction, ISBN 978-80-7414-314-4, Praha, 2011, CZ Affairs, Silvie Kolevová, Prague, 2007, CZ Šestka / Six, exhibition catalogue, Prague, 2006, CZ

Čro 3 Vltava, Český rozhlas; ČT24; Artalk; Fotograf; Respekt; Reflex; Deník Referendum; Artyčok; ihned.cz; ad.

Lesák, J.: Be like water, In: Rajón, issue #5, Praha, 2016, s. 18-19, ISSN 2336-2049. Lesák, J.: Jan Nálevka — Nové pojetí pokroku. In: Fotograf, #28, cultura/natura, Praha, 2016, s. 101, ISSN 1213-9602. Lesák, J.: Lev Manovich — Osobní se stává veřejným. In: Fotograf, #23, umělé světy, Praha, 2014, s. 82-86, ISSN 1213-9602. Lesák, J.: Fenomén archivu ve vztahu k fotografickému médiu v kontextu současného umění. In: FOTOGRAFIE + / = UMĚNÍ, s. 64-73, ISBN: 9788074147319. Potřeba lépe se naučit obývat svět, vol.1, in: FOODLAB.CZ, 4/21/2010

Umění archeologie, vol. 2, in: FOODLAB, 4/28/2010

Směrem ke komunismu forem? Autorství?, vol. 3, in: FOODLAB, 6/4/2010 „Visual studies“, nové chápání vizuality, vol. 4, in: FOODLAB, 3/8/2010