Michal Cimala | Agate F1

The basic ground plan of the work of sculptor, painter, designer and musician Michal Cimala (born 1975) is shaped by a sensitivity and sense for contradictory phenomena across contemporary collective and personal reality.

The enthusiasm and intoxication with the speed of technical and technological change, which pushes human consciousness into new experiential dimensions, alternate with fatigue, skepticism and anxiety calling for a pause and reflection on what is being unnaturally overtaken. The human being loses itself in configurations of its own alienation and in a fall into an acausal black hole. We increasingly realize that the universe and inorganic nature confront us with our physical fragility and psychological vulnerability. Human consciousness enters the labyrinth of acceleration in the hope that this path leads somewhere further. From a long-term perspective, however, humankind cannot compete with its own inventions based on mechanical principles of acceleration. Our relationship to time appears here as both a form-giving and a destructive force.

Michal Cimala sends this message into the world through his sculptures and paintings, in which the metaphor of human presence transforms into hosts of derailed superheroes who infect spacetime and themselves become fossils and post-products of overpainted memory. New idols, cults and rituals die before anyone notices them. The experiment, humanity, seems to have slipped out of control.

The title of the exhibition refers to the structure of a cut agate stone, which between its rind and core displays a multiplied set of rings (like tree rings) that, in their abstract shorthand, may recall the Formula 1 racetrack. The mineral, as an extracted, self-enclosed geological situation, provokes with both its beauty and the presence of a different dimension of time than the human one. It becomes a metaphor for a different experience that opens before us at a time when the human trace vanishes in the speed of its own overpainting. A posthistorical epoch that does not take history seriously loses control even over itself.

The curator of the exhibition project is Petr Vaňous.