Radek Brousil

Radek Brousil is best known for his photography, though this does not necessarily refer to hanging objects or a 2D medium. In his most recent exhibitions especially, he has arrived at an imaginative installation solution tailor-made to individual series. He examines photography from an internal perspective. Along with Václav Kopecký, Hynek Alt and Aleksandra Vajd, he belongs to a line of artists who reflect upon photography as medium. In his most recent projects he combines this approach with resonant social themes.

He does not focus only on the depiction or narration of stories, but understands photography as a set of specific technological and technical properties. In diverse projects Brousil also uncovers and demonstrates the signs of photography as a medium with its own historical, artistic and ideological trajectory.

In light of his current work, the free set of photographs and installations Untitled (2009–2012) occupies a special place in his older projects. These studies do not simply depict the reality in front of the camera, but also contain references to the conditions in which the shots were taken or in which they are exhibited. The series visually demonstrates the process of exposition (Untitled 11, 2011) and the material properties of photography. The artist works with this as with a lens, cutting it into several parts (Untitled 18, 2011), crumpling it (Untitled 14, 2011) or masking it (Untitled 13, 2011). An important feature is the search for the relationship between the space that the photograph depicts and that in which it is placed (Untitled 20, 2012).

Untitled 8 (2009), in which Brousil frames unexposed Polaroid film, abandons the depicted reality altogether, and introduces a tabula rasa, a clean surface untouched by the light reflected from the world of the question, represents a different approach. We might interpret this work as a more modest prototype of Brousil’s series Studio Works and Studio Works 2.

In Studio Works (2013), he focuses his attention on the technical equipment and the aids used mainly in photographic work in a studio. Tripods, reflective plates and rolls of paper venture forth from the space behind the lens and become the subject of our interest. They are illuminated and exposed using methods typical of studio photography. What is important is the neutrality, the matter-of-factness of the tableaux, the soft lighting and the black or white background. In this professional equipment Brousil discovers and points to the technical aesthetic of its utilisation. The craftsmanship of processing, balanced symmetry and frontal views render it artistic subject matter in our eyes, in which the relationship between abstract beauty and functionality is sensitively balanced.

Studio Works 2 (2014) also uses the equipment of a photographic studio as its subject matter. However, Brousil collects this equipment and composes it in a way that reduces its functional quality and stylises it. He achieves this through highly contrasting colours and a more dynamic lighting and arrangement. He sometimes uses flames and smoke so that the final impression is of the organic predominating over the technical. In several cases the resulting work evokes an imaginary natural landscape. Typical of both series and of Brousil’s work in general is work carried out in the studio using applied and advertising photographs. It is in the studio that he can plan carefully, illuminating and composing scenes and thus cutting down greatly on the element of chance or spontaneity.

The first work that deviates from the purely conceptual and formalistic approach and enriches it with social and historical themes is The Ultimate Norm (2015), for which Brousil won the Oskar Čepán Award in 2015. The artist’s older creative approaches are retained, the photographs are exposed under studio conditions and are of high technical quality. However, Brousil expands his interrogation of the internal laws of the medium into the relationship of the photography industry with dark skin, showing how the technological aspects of photography can become socially and historically conditioned. One part of the gallery installation comprises thirteen photographs of the same scene, each of which is the result of different parameters of exposure. An almost formalist study results that problematises the degree to which photographs truly reproduce reality.

Brousil was to develop this line of thought in his next two exhibitions. In Black and White Photography (Gallery Jelení, 2016) he took plaster casts by the anthropologist and sculptor František Vladimír Foit that depict black Africans. However, they have not been painted and their whiteness is paradoxical. Brousil photographed these sculptures and exposed the material in such a way that the negative was as close as possible to an authentic depiction of black people. This was again a formal process intended to raise questions concerning the objectivity of science and art.

The large exhibition Černá a bílá ve fotografii / Black and White in Photography (Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace, 2016) is a summation of Brousil’s artistic research relating to the relationship between photography as medium and colonialism. Alongside older projects presented in new installation conditions, we find prototypes in the baroque sculptures of Mauris by Ferdinand Brokoff. He adjusts detailed shots of stone sculptures to polystyrene objects so creating a monumental spatial constellation. Photographs of bodies framed in irregular formats levitate on several layers before an imaginary blue screen.

Here Brousil is concerned with the formal aspects of the reproducible image and its ideological starting points. By investigating this relationship he invites the viewer to perceive critically the medium by which we are constantly surrounded. He pursues this theme and approach in exhibitions both in the Czech Republic and abroad.

2013
Asides, autorská kniha, vydáno Štokovec, Space for Culture