TONUS

Within the exhibition Tonus, the primary motivation behind its conception was the friendship between the artists Roman Bicek and Matej Gavula and their mutual respect for each other’s work, as well as the desire to realise a project that would bring sculpture and painting together, taking their current artistic practices as its point of departure. These are two fundamental media of visual art, which can be understood as different ways of organising matter rather than as two incompatible categories. The encounter between the two artists in the exhibition is not based on a simple opposition, but on an associative register of forms in which both approaches interpenetrate. The title of the exhibition derives from the term tonus. The word originates from the Greek tonos, meaning tension, stretching or exertion. In medicine, the term refers to the basic degree of muscular tension that persists even when a muscle is not engaged in conscious movement; it is therefore neither entirely passive nor inactive at rest. It nevertheless maintains a certain degree of tension that enables it to respond to stimuli, stabilise the body and maintain its position. It is a state between rest and activity. For the exhibition, what matters above all is the understanding of tonus as a degree of internal tension that enables a given form to maintain its structure. Here, this state is translated into a consideration of matter, corporeality and sculptural/painterly form. Tension is present in shape, material or gesture. In sculpture, this may involve the relationship between weight, gravity, support, pliability and the resistance of the material. A sculptural object appears motionless, yet its form can convey a sense of pressure, compression, expansion or stretching. In painting, tonus may be present in the intensity of the painterly gesture, the layering of pigment, the tension between line and surface, or the way in which corporeality is articulated. In this sense, the physiological term is not being used literally, but rather extended metaphorically. Within these possibilities, the exhibition explores several relationships: softness and firmness, relaxation and contraction, passivity and activity, the anatomical and the non-anatomical body. Among other things, the exhibition’s concept also considers whether painting can be understood as the shaping of matter and sculpture as gesture. This perspective allows us to regard Bicek’s paintings not primarily as pictorial counterparts to Gavula’s objects, but as equivalent material processes. Gavula’s objects, in turn, can be read as forms that establish a spatial and scalar relationship with the viewer’s body. They do not need to depict a specific body in order to evoke corporeal associations. Bicek’s more anatomically explicit drawings and paintings, in turn, can convey an experience of the body through deformation, fragmentation or painterly gesture. In both cases, tonus may be what holds the form together — literally or metaphorically. — Lucia Gavulová